Russian lawmakers are demanding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky be assassinated and his country bombed into oblivion after what the Kremlin touted as a “Ukrainian terrorist attack” in a border region early Thursday.
Every level of Russian government from Vladimir Putin to the Federal Security Service and regional governors blamed the Ukrainian military for the attack in Bryansk, which authorities said had left two people dead and a child injured. The official version of events from the Kremlin is that Ukrainian “Nazis” and “saboteurs” stormed over the border into Russia, invaded two villages, shot up a car, took hostages, and scattered explosive devices throughout the area.
Though a group of Russian volunteers took credit for the mayhem—led by a well-known Russian neo-Nazi who has openly spoken about his past cooperation with the security services, though he now says he is fighting for Ukraine—the incident seems to portend a dark new phase in the war against Ukraine. One after one, Putin’s minions in parliament and mouthpieces on social media immediately called for revenge, arguing that the “red line” had been crossed and it was now time to go to war for real (as opposed to just lobbing cruise missiles at civilians.)
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“We will destroy 🚀🚀🚀, we will rebuild,” one lawmaker wrote to colleagues in a private chat about events in Bryansk, according to the independent outlet Verstka.
“‘Zelensky is fucked,” another lawmaker was quoted saying.
“Everyone wants to fuck up [the Ukrainians], fuck, these are children,” a source in Russia’s Federation Council told Verstka, using a slur to refer to Ukrainians.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called for the families of the “saboteurs” to be hunted down, noting that they “might live on Russian territory.”
Lawmaker Mikhail Delyagin said the “only normal response” to the incident is the “immediate elimination of Zelensky and [Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii] Zaluzhnyi.”’ Several Kremlin-connected military bloggers jumped on board, calling for Ukrainian leaders to be assassinated using “Mossad methods” and wiped out like “Chechen terrorists.”
The prospect that the “attack” could be used by the Kremlin as a pretext to order a full-on mobilization was lost in the frenzied reactions of “patriots” who’ve spent the better part of the war fuming that Moscow hasn’t used enough brutality to force Ukraine into submission.
But in the wake of the chaos in Bryansk—accounts of which remain murky several hours later—even some pro-Kremlin figures blamed Russian military leadership.
“It is absolutely clear that if last summer the ‘brothers’ from ‘Azov’ had been hanged on construction cranes and trees in Mariupol for several weeks, gradually decomposing, then there would be no raids in the Bryansk region now,” wrote one popular military blogger.
“Ukrainian nationalists really like it when they are given security guarantees and then sent home,” he said, blasting Moscow’s prisoner swap that saw hundreds of Ukrainian POWs freed.
Others questioned how the “saboteurs” had managed to pull off such an attack in the first place, with one high-profile propaganda channel questioning “how they entered and left so calmly.”
Ukraine has denied involvement and suggested the attack was either a “provocation” or carried out by Russian partisans. Several independent Russia media outlets also poked holes in the Kremlin’s official version of events, noting that none of the state-run news outlets had filmed from the scene of the attack, despite always being the first to arrive in such events.
Similarly, residents living near the scene were quoted saying they’d been unaware of any hostage situation, and that they had not seen any Russian security services in the area, despite the FSB saying it was on the scene to weed out the “saboteurs.”
Putin, for his part, is scheduled to meet with Russia’s Security Council on Friday to discuss the incident, and the Kremlin has made clear it has not ruled out whether the situation would lead the president to up the stakes in the war.
The pressure now appears to be on for him to do just that.
“If even 10%” of Russians who oppose the war are “affected by this PR [in Bryansk], that will be 100,000 people who will fight and carry out terrorist attacks,” wrote pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov. “So the stunt in the Bryansk region will be continued in other regions. And there will definitely be something in Moscow.”
