Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has effectively accused Russia of invading his country, saying troops have been moved across the border to support separatists now fighting on two fronts in the east.
Poroshenko yesterday canceled a planned trip to Turkey and demanded an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council after the six-month crisis deepened with reports of fresh Russian incursions along Ukraine’s southeastern coast.
“Russian forces have actually entered Ukraine,” Poroshenko said in a statement.
Photo: Reuters
The accusation comes just two days after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Minsk on Tuesday.
Poroshenko stopped short of calling the movements an outright invasion, but convened an urgent meeting of Ukraine’s national security council to discuss the Russian moves.
In Brussels, a NATO military officer told Reuters that the alliance believes there are now more than 1,000 Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Russia has repeatedly denied it is fighting in Ukraine, and speaking after the Minsk negotiations, Putin said that a solution to the crisis in east Ukraine is “not our business; it is a domestic matter for Ukraine itself.”
He said all Russia could do was “support the creation of an environment of trust.”
Putin’s words, however, jar sharply with events on the ground. Fighters and weapons have long been able to move freely along the unguarded sections of Russia’s border with Ukraine, and reporters in Novoazovsk near the border with Russia say what appears to be hastily repainted Russian military hardware has appeared in the town in recent days. Ukrainian officials have described the town as under the control of the Russian military.
Russia’s denials appear increasingly flimsy. When the Guardian saw a Russian armored column cross the border two weeks ago, the foreign ministry and local security services denied any incursion had taken place, saying it was a border patrol that had not strayed into Ukrainian territory.
Earlier this week, when nine Russian paratroopers were captured well inside Ukraine, sources in the defense ministry also said they had been part of a border patrol that had become lost and entered Ukraine “by accident.”
The head of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, yesterday admitted that there were serving Russian soldiers among his fighters, but claimed they were volunteers who were taking a holiday in the region.
“Among the Russian volunteers there are many former soldiers, who are fighting alongside us and understand that it’s their duty,” Zakharchenko said in an interview with Russian television. “And moreover, I’ll say it openly, we also have current soldiers, who decided to take their holidays not on the beach, but among us.”
Although Putin’s actions in Ukraine have been supported by the vast majority of Russians, there is increasing dissent inside the country about the growing evidence of a stealth war.
Mikhail Khororkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man, who was released from jail late last year, said Russians should not be silent about the country’s soldiers being killed in Ukraine and secretly buried.
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