Russian President Vladimir Putin said a Ukrainian sabotage group entered Russia's border region on Thursday and opened fire on civilians in a "terrorist act." In, the governor of the Bryansk region said that "Ukrainian saboteurs" shot at a civilian car in the border village of Lyubechany, killing two men and injuring a 10-year-old boy. Kyiv has vehemently rejected the Russian claims.

The alleged incident has not been independently verified.

Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, tweeted that it was a "classic deliberate provocation." "RF [Russia] wants to intimidate its people to justify attacking another country," he said.

Russia has already reported several Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on Russian border areas, including the Bryansk region. But there are no confirmed reports of Ukrainian ground forces infiltrating Russia.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) reported that FSB troops and regular troops on Thursday clashed with "Ukrainian nationalists" who had infiltrated Russia and taken them, hostage.

The FSB said the "nationalists" were then hit by a massive Russian artillery attack and pushed back into Ukraine. According to the FSB, they left a large cache of explosives in the village.

When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Putin called the Kyiv government "nationalists" and "neo-Nazis" and argued that Russia must act against them.

President Zelenskyy was democratically elected, is of Jewish descent, and has no far-right politicians in his government.

President Putin said Thursday on Russian state television that "today they committed another terrorist act, another crime, entered the border area, and opened fire on the civilian population."

“They saw that it was a civilian car and that there were civilians and children sitting there, and they opened fire." They have made it their task to take away our historical memory. "They won't achieve anything; we will push them," he said.

A video surfaced online claiming to show members of the Ukraine-based Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) in front of a local clinic. A shooter in a video posted to Telegram says they entered Russia.

Investigative journalists' group Bellingcat Monitoring describes the RVC as “an entity formally established last year composed mainly of Russian anti-Putin and anti-Kremlin far-right activists in Ukraine."

Bellingcat expert Michael Colborne identified one of the men in the video as RVC boss Denis Kapustin, who also uses the name Nikitin.

"This RVC appears to fight very little, or at least to fight seriously, and Kapustin may have some physical martial arts training but no military experience," Colborne told the BBC.

In a video message, the RVC said it “broke into the Bryansk region to show our compatriots that there is hope that armed free Russians can fight against the regime."

Commenting on the RVC's statement, Andriy Yusov, head of the Ukrainian military intelligence service, said: “These are the people who are fighting militarily against the Putin regime and those who are supporting it... Maybe the Russians are starting to wake up, get something and act concretely. "

Putin this week accused Ukraine and Western spies of stepping up operations in Russia. Russian officials said the drone crashed in the Kolomna district, just 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Moscow, although it has not been confirmed that it was a Ukrainian drone. Two Ukrainian drones are believed to have been massacred in southern Russia.

Russia previously reported that drones had attacked an airbase in southern Russia used for bombing Ukraine. Kiev has denied drone strikes in Russia and accused the Kremlin of propaganda