Kyiv denies claims of saboteurs attacking Russian villages as Putin blames Ukrainian ‘terrorists’

The Kremlin accused Ukraine of sending gunmen over the border to attack Russian civilians, as their war dominated a meeting of G20 states at which the top diplomats of Moscow and Washington met briefly for the first time since Russia invaded its neighbour.

Russia’s FSB security services said Ukrainian fighters raided at least one village in the Bryansk region that borders Ukraine on Thursday, but responsibility was claimed by group calling itself the Russian volunteer corps, which vowed to “show their compatriots there is hope, that free Russian people with weapons in their hands can fight the regime”.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said: “Today they committed another terrorist act, another crime. They entered the border area and opened fire on civilians.

“It was these people who set themselves the task of depriving us of historical memory, depriving us of our history, depriving us of our traditions and language,” he added, pledging that “they will not achieve anything – we will crush them.”

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Bryansk regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said the attackers killed two people and wounded an 11-year-old boy. The FSB said the situation had been brought under control and a large cache of explosives was found in the area, but did not say if anyone had been captured.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said the incident showed that Russia was “an absolutely unstable entity with a colossal number of internal conflicts… This shows that the people of Russia are probably starting to wake up against Putin’s bloody dictatorship.”

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said blaming Kyiv for the raid “is a classic deliberate provocation”.

“Russia wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country and the growing poverty after the year of war,” Mr Podolyak said. “The partisan movement in Russia is getting stronger and more aggressive.”

Heavy fighting continued in eastern Ukraine as Russia tried to seize the ruined town of Bakhmut, and at least three people were killed and six injured when Russian missiles hit an apartment block in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.

“The terrorist state wants to turn every day for our people into a day of terror. But evil will not reign in our land. We will drive all the occupiers out and they will definitely be held accountable for everything,” Mr Zelenskiy said.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Bundestag that his country would ramp up arms production and ignore calls from some quarters to halt weapons deliveries to Kyiv.

“We need a running production of important weapons, equipment and ammunition,” Mr Scholz said, calling for Germany to “create an industrial base that would contribute towards securing peace and freedom in Europe”.

“You don’t create peace by shouting ‘never war again’ here in Berlin while at the same time demanding that all arms deliveries to Ukraine be stopped,” he added. “If Ukraine stopped defending itself, then that would not be peace, but the end of Ukraine.”

US secretary of state Antony Blinken spoke briefly to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in New Delhi, in their first face-to-face meeting since Russia launched all-out war on Ukraine last February.

“End this war of aggression, engage in meaningful diplomacy that can produce a just and durable peace,” Mr Blinken said he told Mr Lavrov, adding that “president [Vladimir] Putin has demonstrated zero interest in engaging”.

The meeting of G20 foreign ministers ended without agreement on an official communique, and Mr Lavrov said: “A number of Western delegations turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian Federation.”