As news spread about the incursion of suspected Ukrainian-backed Russian fighters into Russia's Belgorod border region last Sunday, the head of the Kremlin's RT media Margarita Simonyan addressed her followers on social media and urged them to refrain from spreading rumors until they knew for sure. what's happening.
On Ukrainian television, pro-government commentators spoke of a "special military operation" being carried out inside Russia, mimicking the tone used by Kremlin officials to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has been ongoing since February last year.
Although details remained unclear, footage released on Russian television on Wednesday showed several US-made Humvees and mine-resistant armored vehicles said to have been seized on Russian territory. It appeared to be an escalation of the shadow war, which Ukraine is believed to be waging behind Russian lines as Kiev simultaneously ramps up its global diplomatic offensive.
Fifteen months on from the start of the Russian invasion, the war is now very different from what it was at the beginning, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave the country even briefly and the capital seemed in danger of being overrun.
Last Sunday, Zelensky visited the G7 summit in Japan, where US President Joe Biden supported the joint allied training program for Ukrainian pilots for F16 aircraft, although Kiev did not receive a specific, public promise to supply them with the aircraft.
Most of the Western allied leaders - especially from the countries of Eastern Europe - insist that Russia must be defeated in Ukraine. However, US officials appear to want to distance themselves from the Belgorod attack, and initially claimed that the story of the use of US equipment may have been deliberate Russian disinformation.
Open source experts say the footage appears to indeed show US-made equipment at specific locations in Russia near Ukraine - although some have said the photos may have been staged with equipment seized elsewhere inside Ukraine.
Such confusion reflects the increasingly complex dynamics surrounding the conflict. Western countries want to support Ukraine, but are uncomfortable with some of its actions, while Ukraine complains that Western military support is too limited to be truly decisive.
US officials appear to want to distance themselves from the Belgorod attack, and initially claimed that the story of the use of US equipment may have been deliberate Russian disinformation
Inside Russia, the conflict is increasingly linked to a wider political divide and what could be a prelude to a struggle to succeed Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. This was evident in the bloody battle to conquer the strategic city of Bakhmut, in which the founder of the Wagner mercenary group and former Kremlin contractor Yevgeny Prigozhin lashed out at the Russian military leadership.
"We are in such a state that we could lose Russia," Prigozhin said in an interview last Sunday. The growing divide between ordinary Russians whose children are conscripted to fight and the state elites could "end in a revolution like 1917," he said.
A complex diplomatic battlefield
Some pro-Ukrainian commentators have long portrayed the war in Ukraine as a war against broader Russian imperialism, in which they hope Putin will eventually be ousted and the Kremlin abandon its centuries-old efforts to dominate the neighborhood.
Ever since the pro-Western revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 that ousted pro-Kremlin leaders, Putin has been determined to prevent more Russian satellite states from turning to the West.
As a result of this rivalry, which has no end in sight, senior NATO and US officials this month visited Armenia, once a close ally of Russia, which now claims it could withdraw from the Collective Security Treaty Organization, an alliance of former Soviet states, because of what it sees as weak support in the conflict. with Azerbaijan around Nagorno-Karabakh.
The rivalry also intersects with much broader geopolitics, in which Russian-Chinese cooperation is growing, but Beijing is still scrambling to supply the Kremlin with weapons to use against Ukraine.
For now, escalation in Ukraine seems the most likely option, although NATO leaders at the Vilnius summit in July are expected to move toward a new "European security architecture" that will eventually include Ukraine and leave Russia isolated as long as Putin is in power, who he is now 70 years old.
This Sunday, Denmark expressed hopes that a peace summit will be organized in Copenhagen in July, which will be attended by Ukraine, but for now the presence of Russia is questionable. After the Belgorod attack, Putin used the Kremlin awards ceremony to repeat his earlier claim that Ukraine was not a state, saying it had never existed "in the history of mankind".
For its part, it seems likely that Russia will continue to push unsubstantiated stories about Ukrainian actions inside Russia — including claims earlier this month that a man in Chechnya, who admitted he was paid by the Ukrainian state, burned a Koran. That story led to massive pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian protests in Grozny.
Some analysts claim that even the alleged drone attack on the Kremlin that was reported at the beginning of the month could be a Russian operation "under a false flag" in order to blame it on Kiev.
Russian fighters for Ukraine?
At the same time, however, American media have published allegations from intelligence officials who claim that Kiev has carried out attacks inside Russia, possibly including several murders.
Ukrainian officials claim the attack in Belgorod was carried out independently of Ukrainian forces, but several analysts have suggested in television appearances that the attack was "supervised" by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate, known by its acronym HUR.
Russian analysts claim that the attack in Belgorod was meant to divert attention from the loss of Bakhmut. If this is the case, then they probably succeeded in that - the attack was the main topic on Ukrainian and Russian social networks as well as on news shows.
Speaking on Ukrainian television, HUR spokesman Andriy Yusov did not confirm participation, but said that the attack was carried out by the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Legion of Russian Freedom.
In its first social media appearance in March 2022, the Russian Liberation Legion describes itself as Russians fighting with Ukraine against Putin's government, portraying itself as a predominantly centrist, pro-democracy group.
Russian voluntary corruption, in contrast, represents an unusual form of right-wing Russian nationalism, calling for a much smaller and ethnically "pure" Russian state, which would explicitly relinquish control over non-Russian ethnic areas, including those currently within the Russian Federation.
It is difficult to estimate how popular this eccentric attitude is within Russia.
At a time when Ukraine is fighting for its life, there is a clear enthusiasm within the country to use all available means to fight back. If Russian groups backed by Ukraine used American equipment on Russian soil last Sunday, some in Kiev fear it could be self-defeating and could threaten their access to powerful Western weapons like F-16 jets.
However, for now, officials in Washington have not hinted that this could be the case.
"We generally do not encourage or facilitate attacks inside Russia, and we have made that clear," said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the US State Department. "But as we also said, it is up to Ukraine to decide how to fight this war."
The author is a Reuters columnist
Prepared by: N. Bogetić
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