The Kremlin accused Ukraine of sending gunmen over the border to attack Russian civilians, as their war dominated a meeting of G20 states at which the top diplomats of Moscow and Washington met briefly for the first time since Russia invaded its neighbour.

Russia’s FSB security services said Ukrainian fighters raided at least one village in the Bryansk region that borders Ukraine on Thursday, but responsibility was claimed by group calling itself the Russian volunteer corps, which vowed to “show their compatriots there is hope, that free Russian people with weapons in their hands can fight the regime”.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said: “Today they committed another terrorist act, another crime. They entered the border area and opened fire on civilians.

“It was these people who set themselves the task of depriving us of historical memory, depriving us of our history, depriving us of our traditions and language,” he added, pledging that “they will not achieve anything – we will crush them.”

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Kyiv denies claims of saboteurs attacking Russian villages as Putin blames Ukrainian ‘terrorists’

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Bryansk regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said the attackers killed two people and wounded an 11-year-old boy. The FSB said the situation had been brought under control and a large cache of explosives was found in the area, but did not say if anyone had been captured.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said the incident showed that Russia was “an absolutely unstable entity with a colossal number of internal conflicts… This shows that the people of Russia are probably starting to wake up against Putin’s bloody dictatorship.”

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Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said blaming Kyiv for the raid “is a classic deliberate provocation”.

“Russia wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country and the growing poverty after the year of war,” Mr Podolyak said. “The partisan movement in Russia is getting stronger and more aggressive.”