Ukraine can’t stop Vladimir Putin’s re-election as Russian President on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean it can’t shatter the perfect image of his sacred day – by bringing the war once again to Russian soil. Throughout the week, Ukrainian drones have been striking oil refineries and energy facilities deep inside Russian territory, while anti-Kremlin Russian militias fighting on Ukraine’s side have crossed the border on tanks and started a fight with Russian forces.

This incursion into Russian territory wasn’t unprecedented: last spring, exiled Russians fighting on Ukraine’s side infiltrated several Russian towns in the Belgorod region, fought for several days, and then withdrew. The dire state of Russia’s border defences hasn’t improved since then: on Tuesday, some one hundred fighters of the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Siberian Battalion and the Russian Volunteer Corps entered the Belgorod and Kursk regions. Since then, they claim to have captured one village and reported fighting in four others, also publishing videos of their skirmishes. Russian officials have denied the fall of Tyotkino in the Kursk region but confirmed ongoing battles.

Moscow was forced to impose a six-month ban on gasoline exports to keep domestic prices under control

In addition to keeping a part of the Russian army from moving into Ukraine, Oleksii Baranovskyi, a fighter with the Freedom of Russia Legion, said the attacks were the fighters’ ‘voting method’: ‘We, as caring citizens of Russia, have thus decided our political will, our attitude towards these elections, and the regime of Vladimir Putin.’ Soldiers have urged Russians via social media to ignore the presidential elections, calling the ballots and polling stations ‘fiction’. They also asked civilians from the Belgorod and Kursk regions to stay in the basements or evacuate until the regions are ‘completely liberated from the Putin regime’s troops’.

In public, Putin hasn’t appeared too concerned by the cross-border invasion: after all, why worry about a few more dead Russian soldiers? ‘I have no doubt that the main purpose is to, if not disrupt the presidential elections in Russia, then at least somehow interfere with the normal process of expressing the will of citizens,’ he said this week in an interview with Russian state media. He also asserted that the goal of the incursion was ‘to gain a trump card for the exchange of territories in possible negotiations’ and to create an ‘information effect’.

Alongside Russian border towns, Russian oil refineries have also been on fire. Waves of drone strikes hit the Rosneft plant near Moscow, one of the country’s largest crude-processing facilities, and halted operations at the smaller Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the Rostov region and at the Lukoil Norsi plant in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The three hit facilities account for about 12 per cent of Russia’s oil-processing capacity. Ukrainians joke that these drone strikes have been more effective than western sanctions against Russia: Moscow was forced to impose a six-month ban on gasoline exports to keep domestic prices under control and so it could continue to send fuel to its forces.

Kyiv ‘will not seek approval from anyone’ about what targets to hit in Russia, said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. ‘If we reached Ryazan already today, it is still far from our record. Believe me, it will continue and we will not stop… As regards the military-industrial complex, what feeds the Russian army – it will all be destroyed.’