The FSB reported on the elimination of the “Ukrainian sabotage group”, which allegedly tried to enter the Bryansk region, and published a video with bloodied bodies. Later, the names of those killed were named. Judging by the profiles of these people in social networks and information in the media, these are fighters of the Ukrainian volunteer battalion "Brotherhood". There are a lot of oddities and inconsistencies in the video itself. In addition, the "Brotherhood" battalion was not previously known as a unit that participates in operations behind the front line.
In the FSB video, four of the dead lie in the snow in various positions, their faces blurred. Weapons are scattered around.
“As a result of a clash on December 25, 2022, four saboteurs were killed, who attempted to penetrate the territory of the Bryansk region from Ukraine,” the FSB said in a statement. Telegram channels immediately noticed a number of inconsistencies, in particular, Moscow calling notes that one of the killed "saboteurs", who had to walk kilometers across rough terrain, had completely clean boot soles.
The FSB report says that “the dead were armed with German SIG Sauer submachine guns and 4 bombs of 40 kg in TNT equivalent” and were allegedly preparing a terrorist attack. The Insider reached out to officers of the Ukrainian Defense Forces for comment, and they pointed to the inconsistency of the weapons with the assigned tasks. According to sources, the civilian SIG Sauer MPX carbines shown in the FSB video are not in service with the Ukrainian army, but they can be bought at any hunting store for 143,000 hryvnias, they have mechanical sights, and they do not shoot in automatic mode. In addition, The Insider sources in the Ukrainian police reported that the carbines turned out to be the personal hunting weapons of the killed, registered on them.
Moscow calling also noticed that for some reason a tag was blurred on one of the carbines in the video:
Shortly after the publication of the FSB video, the Gray Zone Telegram channel, which is believed to be associated with the Wagner PMC, published uncut photographs from the place where the "saboteurs" were killed. Experts, to whom The Insider showed these photos, there was an assumption that the killed people in the pictures, judging by the damage, died as a result of a vehicle being blown up by a mine. This can indirectly explain the clean soles of one of the victims.
This version was confirmed in a conversation with The Insider by Ukrainian military expert Leonid Dmitriev: “Civilian weapons, civilian clothes, civilian equipment, atypical composition. The main thing is suspiciously clean clothes and perfectly clean shoes. Plus, injuries and postures are typical for mine-explosives (legs are broken, the lower part of the body is bloodied and torn for everyone). One of the carbines has damage typical of a shrapnel that has entered. None of the carbines is not brought into combat condition. None of the rifles has been converted from a hunting rifle (according to Ukrainian legislation, there is a length limit, and in order to withstand it, folding butts from the factory for the Ukrainian market are pinned).”
Shortly after the video was published, the FSB named the names of those killed:
- Yuriy Gorovets, born in 1988 (callsign "Svyatosha", group commander);
- Maxim Mikhailov, born in 1990 (call sign “Don't drink beer”, sapper);
- Taras Karpyuk, born in 1984 (call sign "Tarasy", sapper);
- Bogdan Lyagov, born in 2003 (call sign Apollo, sapper).
The Insider found the TikTok profiles of Lyagov , Mikhailov and Gorovets . Judging by their posts, they really were in a volunteer detachment.
Taras Karpyuk was wounded near Illovaysk in 2014. The bullet hit the magazine with tracer cartridges, the magazine exploded, Karpyuk was seriously injured. Yuriy Gorovets, callsign Svyatosha, was wounded near Mariupol in 2014. They were both demobilized due to injury and could not be in the service, sources told The Insider. There is no evidence that they were in the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the moment.
In the battalion itself, when asked by The Insider to comment on the FSB report, they said they could neither confirm nor deny this information. Battalion founder Dmitry Korchinsky also declined to comment.
Dmitriev expressed doubt that the volunteers of the Brotherhood battalion could be sent across the border:
“Brotherhood exists only at the headquarters level near Kyiv. Since the summer, it has existed to register Belarusians and other foreigners into the ZSU through it, and there they are engaged in training before filtration events. They are not sent to the front and they have nothing to do with sabotage activities, especially in terms of activities in the rear. It is doubtful that they were sent across the border on foot. It happens differently."
The founder of the Brotherhood is Ukrainian politician Dmitry Korchinsky, a man with a difficult biography. He participated in the first Russian-Chechen war among the Ukrainian volunteers from the UNA-UNSO, fought in Transnistria and Abkhazia, and was a candidate for the presidency of Ukraine in 2004. Korchinsky, together with the Russian philosopher-propagandist Alexander Dugin, was a member of the Supreme Council of the International Eurasian Movement, but left it in 2007 in connection with the anti-Ukrainian activities of the council. In 2005, before the arrival of President Vladimir Putin to the Seliger camp, Korchinsky instructed the Nashi movement on how to fight the revolution. During the Euromaidan in December 2013, some Ukrainian media called him the organizer of provocations designed to accuse the protesters of attacking police officers and pogroms, while others wrote about him as one of the initiators of the revolution.