Two armed groups that claimed responsibility for an attack in the Russian region of Belgorod from Ukraine at the end of May announced new incursions on Thursday in videos allegedly recorded in different cities in Russia.
“The second phase [da operação] promised by the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps has begun”, announced one of the groups on the Telegram social network, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE.
The group said armed volunteers had entered Russia and were heading towards the town of Shebekino in the Belgorod region, less than a dozen meters as the crow flies from the Ukrainian border.
Shebekino Mayor Valentin Demydov said many residents were fleeing the city due to constant Ukrainian shelling, not to mention the alleged raid by the Russian Volunteer Corps.
The mayor explained that the fleeing residents were being received at the Belgorod Arena stadium, according to EFE.
The other group, the Freedom for Russia Legion, released a video allegedly recorded in Grayvoron, also in the Belgorod region and close to the border, but about 80 kilometers as the crow flies from Shebekino.
In the message, the group announced its intention to “liberate all of Russia, from Belgorod to Vladivostok,” located in the far east of the country near the border with China and North Korea.
The two groups have been fighting alongside the Ukrainian military against Russian forces for months and say they intend to forcibly overthrow Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The kyiv government claims to have nothing to do with the actions of these groups on Russian soil, but tolerates their operations on Ukrainian soil.
Russian authorities said they killed more than 70 “Ukrainian terrorists” in the Belgorod attack in late May.
The two armed groups denied any casualties and said only Russian nationals were involved in the attacks.
The alleged raids come at a time when British secret services today signaled what will be “probably the first call to replace Putin on state-sanctioned Russian television since the start of the war.”
On May 27, “Russian opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin appeared on Russia’s NTV channel and called for the election of a new president in 2024 to restore normal relations with Europe,” the British Defense Ministry said.
Nadezhdin “has been a critic of the war since Russia’s invasion” of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, according to British Defense, which has been posting daily analyzes of the war on Twitter.
For British analysts, the opponent’s statement was made in a context of “limitations on freedom of expression that have not been seen since Soviet times” introduced by Putin in the last 15 months.
“There is a realistic chance that recent acid rhetoric from nationalist figures such as Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin will encourage opposition figures to challenge taboo topics,” they added.
In a previous assessment quoted by the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform, the British secret services had claimed that Russia has shown a more reactive attitude since the beginning of May, instead of advancing towards defined military objectives.
Information published by the two sides about the course of the war cannot be immediately verified by independent sources.
Source: TSF
