What started as something practically anecdotal seems to be, little by little, becoming a headache for Moscow, which views the phenomenon with concern. This is the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps, a group that describes itself as a formation of Russian volunteers that is part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. At the beginning of March, they claimed responsibility for an attack in the Russian region of Bryansk, on the border with Ukraine, and since then they have starred in different episodes.
RVC fighters infiltrated Russia’s Bryansk Oblast for the second time on April 6, 2023.
They released a video showing the fighters talking to a man. A local resident was asked what town they are in and he replied that it is Sluchovsk, a small Russian town in Briansk Oblast, about a kilometer north of Russia’s border with Chernihiv Oblast in Ukraine.
“The Russian Volunteer Corps came to the Bryansk region to show their compatriots that there is hope, that the free Russian people with arms in hand can fight against the regime,” the group said on its Telegram account after the attack. March together with a video in which they are supposedly in front of a post office and infirmary in Liubechane, next to the Ukrainian border.
According to the independent television channel TV Dozhd, the commander of the unit would be Denis Nikitin, who was already interviewed last October by the Ukrainian television channel TSN and said that he called himself a second-generation Muscovite and said that he was fighting for Ukraine.
Another fighter from the group claimed that 45 men from the “Russian Volunteer Corps” infiltrated Russian territory and ambushed two armored infantry vehicles.
Both the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin describe the attacks as “terrorists” and attribute them to “armed Ukrainian nationalists.”
The Ukrainian Presidency, for its part, denied being behind the attack.
“A false report spread by Russian propagandists that a group of Ukrainian saboteurs and reconnaissance crossed into Russia constitutes a deliberate provocation,” Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the President’s Office, tweeted.
However, according to the digital media outlet The New Voice of Ukraine today, citing Roman Svitan, a military expert and reserve colonel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in Moscow there is fear of what this group might do. “There is not a single defensive structure on the road from Ukraine to Moscow,” he said.
At the same time, Svitan said that the Russians “for some reason firmly believe that our troops will not be able to cover these 450 kilometers, but it takes seven or eight hours by car, or half a day to get to Moscow in an armored car. The fact is that this distance from the northeastern point of Ukraine to Moscow is much less than the width of our front line – more than 1,200 kilometers. The distance from Kherson to Kupyansk is about the same as driving to Moscow and back from Ukraine. Therefore, the Russians understand quite well that with the allocation of forces and resources, Russian citizens fighting against their troops on the territory of Ukraine can carry out this march launch – that’s what the RVC is.
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