Ukraine launches rare cross-border ground assault into Russia

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has launched a surprise ground assault into Russia with troops and armored vehicles, Russian officials and independent military analysts said Wednesday, in what could be one of the largest Ukrainian incursions onto Russian soil in more than two years of war.

The assault, which began Tuesday in the Kursk region of western Russia, has resulted in heavy fighting, according to images from the battlefield verified by independent military analysts and Russian statements.

Videos verified by The New York Times showed armored vehicles being struck several miles inside Russia, and Moscow said it had rushed troops and fighter jets to respond. Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the commander of Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, said the advance of Ukrainian troops had been halted Wednesday evening, while pro-Kremlin military bloggers said Ukrainian forces had captured several settlements near the border.

“Alarming news is coming from the Kursk region for the second day,” Igor Artamonov, the governor of the Russian region of Lipetsk, which borders the Kursk region, said Wednesday. “The Kyiv regime is attacking our borders.”

By Wednesday evening, Ukrainian troops appeared to have advanced several miles into Russian territory, one analyst said, and Russian officials said the fighting was continuing.

The various reports could not be independently verified, and Ukrainian authorities have not commented on the assault. Two spokespeople for the Ukrainian army did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is not the first time that Ukraine has staged ground attacks across the border into Russia. But while previous assaults were carried out by armed groups of Russian exiles backed by Ukraine’s army, the attack Tuesday appeared to have directly involved Ukrainian troops, according to Pasi Paroinen of the Black Bird Group, which analyzes footage from the battlefield.

Paroinen said a few hundred Ukrainian troops, supported by armored vehicles, had most likely crossed the border on the first day of the attack, and that more soldiers had arrived on the second day. Gerasimov said that up to 1,000 Ukrainian troops took part in the cross-border attack, a figure that could not be confirmed.

Military analysts said the attack could be an attempt to divert Russian units from the front lines, thus relieving the pressure on Ukrainian troops struggling to contain Russian advances. But they added that the Russian army had ample reserves of troops to commit to the fight and that the attack risked further stretching Ukraine’s already outnumbered forces.

“Operationally and strategically, this attack makes absolutely zero sense,” Paroinen said. “This seems like a gross waste of men and resources badly needed elsewhere.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the attack started around 8 a.m. Tuesday with Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade attacking border units in the Kursk region, backed by some 30 tanks and armored fighting vehicles. Paroinen reported “multiple sightings” of Stryker armored fighting vehicles, which the United States sent to Ukraine last year.

Rybar, a prominent Russian military blogger, said Wednesday that Ukrainian troops had crossed the border at different points, along at least two lines of attack. He said Ukraine had captured three settlements on the first line, which runs north from the Russian village of Nikolayevo-Darino. On the second line of attack, toward the town of Sudzha, Russian troops were “almost completely surrounded” in the village of Oleshnya, Rybar said.

Paroinen said Ukrainian troops appeared to have advanced up to 5 miles north of Nikolayevo-Darino and that they were pushing toward Sudzha.

Ukrainian shelling in the area of the assault killed five civilians and wounded 24 others, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the Kursk region, said thousands of residents had evacuated the area of the fighting, most of them by their own means.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Wednesday that he would meet with his country’s security services to coordinate a military response to the attacks and that instructions had been given to assist residents of the Kursk region.

Although Ukrainian officials have not officially commented on the attack, Andriy Kovalenko, a senior official focused on Russian disinformation operations, appeared to acknowledge it, writing on Telegram: “Russian soldiers are lying about the controllability of the situation in the Kursk region. Russia does not control the border.”

On Wednesday, Volodymyr Artyukh, the Ukrainian governor of the Sumy region, which sits across from Russia’s Kursk region, ordered the evacuation of some 6,000 residents amid the fighting.

Ukrainian shelling and bombings have in the past targeted Russia’s border regions of Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk, but cross-border attacks have been rare. The first such attacks reported took place in May of last year, carried out by anti-Kremlin Russian fighters aligned with Ukraine. A similar ground attack took place this March.

On both occasions, the attacks were seen as an attempt to unnerve the Russian public and undermine Putin’s efforts to insulate them from the war.

But Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote on social media that those attacks “had little effect on the fighting” in Ukraine and “did not have serious domestic political ramifications for Putin.”

He and other military experts said that if the aim of this week’s attack was to draw Russian troops away from other parts of the front, it had little chance of succeeding.

“Russia already has greater forces/conventional capabilities in the area, better command and control, and it has conscript units that can be deployed, which are not used in Ukraine,” Lee said. “It is unlikely this operation will force Russia to pull significant forces from Ukraine.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.