Russia on Monday denounced incursions by Ukrainian “saboteurs” and a downed drone near a Russian airbase hundreds of kilometers from the front, in the second such operation in a month.
The Russian security service (FSB) reported the “elimination” of “saboteurs” who tried to infiltrate the Briansk region of Russia on the border with Ukraine on Sunday.
The Russian press agencies also indicated that the air defense shot down a Ukrainian drone on Sunday night that was flying towards the Engels airbase, which hosts Russian strategic bombers.
The city of Engels, in the southern Saratov region, is more than 600 kilometers from the border with Ukraine. Its air base had already been attacked at the beginning of the month.
“As a result of the falling debris from the drone, three Russian technical officers who were at the airbase suffered fatal injuries,” the Defense Ministry reported, quoted by the Russian agency TASS.
Ukrainian authorities have so far refrained from any comment on those allegations.
Ukrainian saboteurs “eliminated”
According to the FSB, the group of “saboteurs” who tried to infiltrate the Bryansk region carried weapons and explosives.
After a confrontation on December 25, 2022, four saboteurs (…) were eliminated,” he said.
In a video broadcast by the Russian press agency Ria-Novosti, four bloody corpses are seen, dressed in winter camouflage uniforms and with weapons around them.
At the moment, AFP could not confirm this information with independent sources.
Russia, which launched a military offensive in Ukraine ten months ago, has suffered a series of attacks on military bases and key infrastructure in recent months, which the authorities attribute to the Ukrainians.
The partial destruction of the Crimean bridge in October, which connects the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014 with Russian territory, was a severe setback for the Kremlin, which had already suffered several setbacks on the battlefield.
Ukraine has never confirmed its responsibility for the explosion, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has since multiplied the bombardments against Ukrainian energy infrastructure, leaving millions of Ukrainians without electricity or heating in the dead of winter.
Exclude Moscow from the UN
Ukraine asked for the exclusion of Russia from the United Nations, although that demand has no chance of success, since Moscow has the right of veto in the Security Council, of which it is a permanent member.
“Ukraine calls on UN member states (…) to deprive the Russian Federation of its status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and to exclude it from the UN as a whole,” wrote the Ukrainian minister of Foreign Relations, Dmytro Kuleba.
Putin on Sunday justified his military offensive in the former Soviet republic, saying his goal was to “unite the Russian people.”
“Everything is based on the policy of our geopolitical adversaries, who seek to divide Russia, historical Russia,” Putin denounced in an interview broadcast on Russian television.
The president often refers to the concept of “historic Russia” to justify military intervention in Ukraine, in order to unite Ukrainians and Russians, who form, he says, a single people.
“We are acting in the right direction, we are protecting our national interests, the interests of our citizens, of our people,” he insisted, despite the heavy setbacks suffered by Russian troops in the north, east and south of Ukraine.
The Russian head of state also promised to remove the Patriot air defense system that the United States will deliver to kyiv.
“Of course we will destroy it, 100%!” he said, just three days after assuring that his army would find “an antidote” to avoid a “quite old system”.
On the ground, a wave of missiles struck Kherson, a southern Ukrainian city retaken by kyiv in November after eight months of Russian occupation, on Saturday. The shelling left at least 10 dead and 55 injured.
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky asked his fellow citizens to prepare for possible attacks before the end of the year. “We must be aware that our enemy will try to make this moment dark and difficult,” he said.
