Putin accuses Ukraine of terrorist attack as troops close in on Bakhmut

President Vladimir Putin says a Ukrainian sabotage group has carried out a "terrorist attack" in a southern border region amid Russian forces closing in on the city of Bakhmut.

In a televised address on Thursday, Putin accused the group of opening fire on civilians, including children, in Bryansk.

"They won't achieve anything. We will crush them," he said, adding Russia was fighting "terrorists and neo-Nazis".

Bryansk Governor Alexander Bogomaz said the attackers had shot and killed one person and injured a child.

RIA news agency later quoted the FSB security service as saying the situation was under the control of law enforcement agencies.  

Ukraine accused Russia of staging a false "provocation", but also appeared to imply some form of operation had indeed been carried out by Russian anti-government partisans.

In two videos circulating online, armed men calling themselves Russian "liberators" said they had crossed the border to fight what they referred to as "the bloody Putinite and Kremlin regime."

A spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence suggested the makeup of the sabotage group was a sign of internal strife inside Russia.

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 Kiev than other launch sites.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Putin was being briefed by security chiefs on the situation.

Bryansk Governor Bogomaz said Ukrainian armed forces had carried out a drone attack and fired artillery at other areas near the border.

Russia's deputy foreign minister said the drone attacks which Kiev is alleged to have carried out on Russian military bases would only have been possible with US assistance.

Sergei Ryabkov, in Geneva to address the UN Human Rights Council and the Conference on Disarmament session, said Washington must have provided intelligence and targeting information.

In early December, Russia said Ukrainian drone attacks caused explosions at two airfields in Saratov Ryazan regions leaving three dead.

"We know that those attacks would never be possible in the absence of a very deep and sophisticated assistance by the United States to the Ukrainian military, including targeting, of course, intelligence provision and also some technical assistance of other sorts," Ryabkov said.

On Thursday, Ukrainian forces struggled to hung on to positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut.

The founder of Russia's Wagner private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, released video of his men purportedly filmed near the center of Bakhmut.  

Russian troops, bolstered by hundreds of thousands of reservists called up last year and thousands of convicts recruited by Wagner, have been advancing north and south of the city to cut it off.

Moscow says taking Bakhmut would be a step towards seizing the rest of the surrounding Donbas region.

Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Rakhmanin said, “There is no sense in holding it at any cost."

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