Russia on Friday said that the arrival of US paratroopers in Ukraine to train its forces fighting pro-Russian rebels could reignite the conflict, leading to mass bloodshed.
The arrival of hundreds of US paratroopers in war-torn Ukraine causes “serious concern,” the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
It said the US training program was a step toward Washington supplying weaponry to the Ukrainians fighting pro-Russian separatists in the nation’s Donbass region.
Photo: EPA
“Washington’s encouraging attitude to [Kiev’s] revanchist plans carries a risk of reigniting mass bloodshed in our neighboring country,” Moscow said. “It’s obvious that American soldiers on Ukrainian soil will not bring it peace.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier on Friday that the arriving US troops “can seriously destabilize the situation.”
Moscow blasted the US troops’ mission to instruct the Ukrainian National Guard — a reservist force — for training those “who have stained themselves with the blood of women, children and old men in punitive operations in Donbass.”
“What will the overseas military specialists teach them — how to keep on killing those who speak Russian?” the ministry asked in a strongly worded statement.
It argued that the military training program was the “first step toward supplying Ukraine with the modern American weapons that Kiev’s party of war so desires.”
US President Barack Obama is under pressure from lawmakers and military officials to send weapons to Ukraine to help it fight the insurgency.
Some of his European allies including Germany have warned that sending arms would cause the bloodshed to escalate.
Moscow argued that the arrival of US troops was a “clear breach” of the terms of a truce reached in the Belarussian capital of Minsk in February that called for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Ukraine.
Kiev says Russia has sent thousands of soldiers across the border in eastern Ukraine to support the rebellion, charges Moscow denies. The ceasefire deal aimed to end a year of fighting that has killed more than 6,000 people, but fighting flared up again this month.
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