MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Thursday it was fighting off a “terrorist attack” in the southern Bryansk region bordering Ukraine, where the local governor said a Ukrainian sabotage group had killed one person and news agencies said hostages had been taken.
Ukraine accused Russia of staging a false “provocation”.
Amid reports of shelling and sporadic sabotage, Russia’s border regions have become increasingly volatile since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine a year ago in what it called a “special military operation”.
“We are talking about a terrorist attack. Measures are now being taken to destroy these terrorists,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
He said law enforcement agencies would determine who was responsible, and President Vladimir Putin was being briefed by security chiefs on the situation.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter: “The story about (a) Ukrainian sabotage group in RF (Russian Federation) is a classic deliberate provocation.”
He said Russia “wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country & the growing poverty after the year of war.”
Russia’s FSB security service said in a statement to Russian news agencies on Thursday that its own forces and the army were trying to liquidate what it described as “an armed group of Ukrainian nationalists” who had crossed the border.
Bryansk Governor Alexander Bogomaz said the Ukrainians had shot and killed one person.
“Today, a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group penetrated the Klimovsky district in the village of Lubechanye,” Bogomaz said on his Telegram channel.
“Saboteurs fired on a moving car. As a result of the attack, one resident was killed and a ten-year-old child was wounded.”
He said Ukrainian armed forces had carried out a drone attack and fired artillery at other areas near the border.
Reuters was unable to immediately verify the reports.
British military intelligence said on Wednesday that Russia was launching drone attacks on Ukraine from the Bryansk region, which lies to the north of Ukraine and is closer to its capital Kyiv than other launch sites.
The Russian state news agency TASS said the Ukrainians had infiltrated two villages, taking local residents hostage in one of them. The RIA news agency said several people had been taken hostage in a store in the village of Lubechanye, less than one kilometre from the border with Ukraine.
Russia has accused Ukrainian saboteurs of infiltrating Bryansk before.
In December, the FSB said a four-person Ukrainian “sabotage group” had been “liquidated” while trying to enter Bryansk.
Putin told the FSB this week that it needed to step up its guard against espionage and what he called terrorist threats emanating from Ukraine and the West.
“Your task is to put a barrier in the way of sabotage groups, to stop attempts to illegally transport weapons and ammunition into Russia,” he said in a speech on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Reuters, writing by Mark Trevelyan and Andrew Osborn, editing by Mark Heinrich)
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