Thousands of Russian troops, military equipment pours in Ukraine. It was confirmed by officials that Russian sent thousands of troops and equipments. Is Russia preparing planning for invasion in Ukraine? Ukraine government mobilizes their units and military for the possible response of the invasion and aggression of pro-Russian rebels.
KIEV — Tanks and other military vehicles pouring over the border from Russia into eastern Ukraine. Nightly artillery battles in the region’s biggest city Donetsk and reports of fighting around another regional capital. And now, sightings of the “green men” — professional soldiers in green uniforms without insignia, the same type of forces that had carried out the invasion of Crimea earlier this year.
A senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) official confirmed what Ukrainian military officials and monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) had been saying for days: Russian troops and military equipment are crossing the border into Ukraine, seemingly preparing for renewed military action — though what exactly remains unclear.
The statement drew stern denials from Moscow, which for months has denied any military intervention in eastern Ukraine, though it has acknowledged publicly that Russian volunteers have crossed into Ukraine to support the pro-Russia separatists.
In light of the military build-up, Western officials finally seemed ready to acknowledge that a ceasefire agreement signed on Sept 5 in Minsk, Belarus, had fallen apart and that the threat to peace in Europe posed by the Ukraine crisis had returned in a possibly more virulent form.
The ceasefire is all but dead, Ukraine’s representative to the OSCE, Mr Ihor Prokopchuk, told Austrian newspaper Die Presse. “Since the Minsk agreement ... we have had more than 2,400 breaches of the ceasefire by militant groups. More than 100 Ukrainian soldiers and dozens of civilians have been killed,” he said.
At the United Nations headquarters in New York, the Security Council held an emergency meeting on Ukraine — its 26th — where a top official, Assistant Secretary-General Jens Anders Toyberg-Frandzen, told diplomats he was “deeply concerned about the possibility of a return to full-scale fighting”.
The official also expressed fear of what he called a “frozen and protracted conflict that would entrench the status quo in south-eastern Ukraine for years or several decades to come”.
The NATO official, General Philip Breedlove, the group’s top military commander, said he was “concerned about convoys of trucks taking artillery and supplies into east Ukraine from Russia”. He said there were increased numbers of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine training militants, including in the use of sophisticated weaponry, but that the full scope of the Russian incursion is not clear.
The convoys seemed to be heading east towards areas controlled by rebel groups in Donetsk. The self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic claims all territory of the Donetsk region of Ukraine, but occupies only about half of it now. Rebel field commanders have for weeks spoken openly of a planned offensive.
Russia forcefully denied that any of its troops or equipment had crossed into eastern Ukraine and a government spokesman dismissed Gen Breedlove as unreliable and alarmist.
“We have stressed repeatedly that there have never been and there are no facts behind the regular blasts of hot air from Brussels regarding the supposed presence of Russian armed forces in Ukraine,” the spokesman, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, told Russian news agencies. “We have stopped paying attention to NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Philip Breedlove’s unfounded statements alleging that he observed Russian military convoys invading Ukraine.”
Despite that denial, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military said there was grim evidence of Moscow’s involvement moving in the opposite direction: Five truckloads of bodies of dead Russian fighters, driven back to Russia on Tuesday night. THE NEW YORK TIMES
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