A convoy of burnt-out military trucks, some bearing the "Z" symbol of the Kremlin’s war and appearing to contain bodies, sits along the side of a highway.

But the video, circulating on social media Friday and geolocated by NBC News, doesn’t show a beleaguered section of the front lines in eastern Ukraine. It is a village in Kursk, across the border in southern Russia.

For days now, Vladimir Putin’s forces have struggled to put down an incursion into Russian territory by Ukrainian troops, a surprise attack that threatens to upend the war’s status quo and open a new front in a daring challenge to the Kremlin.

The unprecedented assault entered its fourth day Friday with battles still raging and Moscow rushing reinforcements and bombing its own territory to try to contain the Ukrainian advance.

The operation has left observers struggling to track fast-moving developments on the ground — and to figure out Kyiv’s strategy in launching the attack while its forces are still struggling in several of the conflict’s longtime flashpoints.

With Ukraine tightlipped and Russian officials offering little detail on the extent of the Ukrainian advance, it’s hard to judge the scale or success of the operation beyond poring over videos, like the one showing the convoy and relying on the frenzied chatter of Russia’s influential and often-furious military bloggers.

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Still, it seemed clear this was no mere headline-grabbing raid, the likes of which have been conducted by anti-Kremlin Russian militias since last year, but a carefully planned operation, military analysts have said.

“If we take a step back, it looks to me like the first time that Ukraine’s state forces have invaded Russia,” Frank Ledwidge, a former British military intelligence officer and senior lecturer in war studies at England’s University of Portsmouth, told NBC News. “That’s very significant.”

Russia’s defense ministry has boasted that Ukrainian troops had been stopped, but has yet to report pushing Kyiv’s forces back across the border.

Military command said that some 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers, backed by tanks and military vehicles, were involved in the initial attack. Federal authorities have declared a state of national emergency and thousands of people have been evacuated from Kursk amid reports of civilian casualties and destruction.

On Friday, the ministry said it was sending new reinforcements to the area. It shared videos showing columns of heavy armor headed toward Kursk, and Russian jets bombing what it said were Ukrainian troops and equipment on Russian territory.

But Russian military bloggers painted a less rosy picture, reporting that Ukrainian forces could be in at least partial control of the border town of Sudzha, home to an important natural gas transit hub, and may have moved miles into Russian territory. Some are sounding irate about Russia’s response and why it has been caught off guard.

The Institute for the Study of War said Thursday that Ukraine was able to achieve “operational surprise” and its forces could have moved as deep as 20 miles into Russia although, it said, they “most certainly do not control all of the territory.”

NBC News has not verified the reports.

Ukraine has stayed largely mute on the incursion.

In a first public acknowledgement, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak on Thursday blamed “Russia’s unequivocal aggression” for any escalation within its own territory. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not referred to the incursion directly, only saying in his overnight address that “Russia brought war to our land and must feel what it has done.”

The surprise assault into Russia at a time when Ukraine’s overstretched forces have been struggling to hold onto their own key territory has surprised many observers.

“At a time when Ukrainian defenders in the east are being pushed back on several axes, the use of highly capable Ukrainian combat forces in Kursk is either a brilliant countermove to shift the momentum in the war, or a strategic error which compounds the challenges in Ukraine’s eastern Ukraine defensive operations,” Mick Ryan, a senior fellow for military studies at Lowy Institute, an Australian-based think tank, wrote on X.

Analysts have suggested other possible motives for the operation, including recapturing the world’s attention, a desire to present a victory to a domestic audience or even grabbing as much enemy territory as possible to use as a bargaining chip in future peace talks.

For Ledwidge, with the University of Portsmouth, the most plausible theory is that Ukraine sent its own troops into Kursk “to get the jump” on Russian forces who may have been planning a new offensive on the Sumy region, just across the border. Russia launched an offensive in the neighboring Kharkiv region in May, and Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia could attack Sumy next.

“So the idea is that Ukrainians just stole a march on them,” Ledwidge said.

This hypothesis appears more likely than an effort to draw forces away in the east, he said, because the wealth of Russia’s resources means that unlike the Ukrainians they would not necessarily have to move troops and weapons from one front to defend another.

There are also questions about what the incursion might mean for the support Ukraine relies on from its Western allies.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller has said the U.S. was not in on Ukraine’s plans.

Despite concerns that the use of U.S.-supplied weapons in the cross-border assault could spark backlash, Washington signaled Thursday that it had no issues and saw the operation as an effort by Kyiv to protect itself. “It is consistent with our policy,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said at a news briefing.

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Ukraine 'drones' blitz second Putin airbase to destroy Russian bomber and fighter planes

A “massive drone attack” was reported to have hit a military air base deep inside Russia.

The Ukrainian military said on Friday it had struck a Russian military airfield in the Lipetsk region of western Russia overnight, damaging stockpiles of guided bombs and causing a series of detonations.

Kyiv has been attacking Russian air bases to reduce Moscow’s ability to use its warplanes to strike targets in Ukraine and hammer front lines with guided bombs and missiles.

“Several sources of ignition were recorded, a large fire broke out and multiple detonations were observed,” Kyiv’s military said.

Russian Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 warplanes were based at the airfield, 200 miles inside Russia, it added.

A security source said the attack was carried out by drones as dozens of planes and helicopters stood on the airfield, as well as a warehouse containing 700 guided bombs.

The Russian governor of the Lipetsk region, Igor Artamonov said a “massive attack” by Ukrainian drones had caused explosions, disrupted power supply and wounded nine people.

The Ukrainian source said most of the Russian aircraft did not have time to take off.

“In early August we cleared the Morozovsk airfield of guided bombs and fighters, today it’s the turn of Lipetsk-2,” the source said.

Last Saturday, Ukraine said it had hit an ammunition depot at the Morozovsk airfield, where it said Russian forces stored guided aerial bombs and other equipment and had a number of fuel storage facilities.

Ukraine’s ability to strike military targets deep inside Russia has been hampered by its lack of long-range missiles.

It has been appealing to the West to allow it to use Western-supplied weapons for such strikes.

British military expert Professor Michael Clarke told Sky News: “This attack on Lipetsk is the most significant airfield attack so far that I can think of in the war to date.”

The attack aimed to damage Russia’s capability to launch waves of “glide bombs” from aircraft over Russia into Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Putin’s military was engaged in a fourth day of fighting against Ukranian troops who launched a surprise raid into western Russia.

The Defence Ministry in Moscow said on Friday its forces “continue to repel” a Ukrainian attempt to break into the Kursk region.

Russian forces were still battling Ukrainian troops after they smashed through the Russian border on Tuesday.

Russia’s emergency ministry declared a federal state of emergency in the Kursk region on Friday after the major Ukrainian incursion this week.

In one of the biggest Ukrainian attacks on Russia since the war began in February 2022, around 1,000 Ukrainian troops rammed through the Russian border in the early hours of August 6 with tanks and armoured vehicles, covered in the air by swarms of drones and pounding artillery, according to Russian officials.

Heavy fighting was reported near the town of Sudzha, where Russian natural gas flows into Ukraine, raising concerns about a possible sudden stop to transit flows to Europe.

The incursion has come as a shock to Russia, nearly two-and-a-half years after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Kursk’s regional acting governor, Alexei Smirnov, said thousands of residents had been evacuated.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that the army and the Federal Security Service (FSB) had halted Ukraine’s advance and were battling Kyiv’s units in the Kursk region.

“Units of the Northern group of forces, together with the FSB of Russia, continue to destroy armed formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Sudzhensky and Korenevsky districts of the Kursk region, directly adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian border,” the ministry said.

The Ukrainian military has remained silent on the Kursk offensive, though President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the Ukrainian army on Thursday for its ability “to surprise” and achieve results. He did not explicitly reference Kursk.

Some Russian bloggers said Ukraine’s forces were pushing towards the Kursk nuclear power station, which lies about 37 miles northeast of Sudzha.

Ukraine wants to pin down Russian forces, which control 18 per cent of its territory, though the strategic significance of the border offensive was not immediately clear.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the Ukrainian attack was an attempt to force Moscow to divert resources from the front and to show the West that Ukraine could still fight.

Russian forces continue to seize more territory in eastern Ukraine, but are suffering heavy losses, according to British defence chiefs.

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