Ukraine said Russia is expanding its military presence in rebel-held areas as pro-Russian fighters attacked Ukrainian forces with artillery after as many as 200 separatists were killed.
“The war is not over yet,” Igor Plotniskiy, the newly elected head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic said in a video statement posted on the LPR website. The LPR wants “maximal integration with Russia,” he said.
Ukraine said its forces killed the rebels at Donetsk Airport in the biggest separatist loss since a Sept. 5 truce. Russia sent tanks and military vehicles across the border into rebel areas, military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in a statement yesterday that convoys of Russian trucks and tanks were seen in the city of Donetsk and the nearby town of Makeevka.
More than 40 trucks were seen on the eastern outskirts of Makeevka by OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, some towing howitzers and carrying personnel in dark green uniforms without insignias, according to the statement. The mission also observed a convoy of nine unmarked T-72 and T-64 Russian tanks outside of Donetsk city.
Russia continues to increase its forces deployed in rebel areas, Ukrainian military spokesman Volodymyr Polevyi said yesterday in Kiev. Five government soldiers were killed and 17 were wounded in fighting over the past 24 hours, according to Polevyi and a Defense Ministry statement on Facebook.
Lavrov Deflects
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov refused to comment on whether his government sent troops and tanks into Ukraine at a press conference yesterday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing.
“Even Jen Psaki said that the State Department doesn’t have the information about this,” Lavrov said, referring to the State Department’s spokeswoman. “If Psaki doesn’t have it, I don’t.”
The conflict is moving toward the same kind of open warfare that broke out after the February ouster of Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine a month later.
At least 4,035 people have been killed and 9,336 wounded in eastern Ukraine in the fighting, according to the United Nations.
Animosity between the government in Kiev and pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk rose last week after the separatists held Nov. 2 elections condemned by the U.S. and European Union as illegitimate and a violation of the cease-fire. Ukraine has blamed Russia for inciting the conflict by delivering cash, weapons and fighters to the region. Putin says his country isn’t militarily involved.
‘Flaring Up’
“The separatists and their Russian supporters are renewing the conflict after pausing for elections,” Joerg Forbrig, senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. in Berlin, said by phone. “The war’s intensity is flaring up because Putin finds it hard to stop the aggression given economic deprivations and nationalist expectations at home.”
Both sides have accused each other of breaking the truce agreed in Minsk, Belarus, with the Ukrainian government saying it’s suffered more than 100 killed and about 600 wounded since the cease-fire came into force.
Rebel Shelling
The artillery strikes at the Donetsk airport on Nov. 7 were a response to rebel shelling with surface-to-surface Grad missiles, mortars and howitzers that killed five soldiers and wounded 16, Lysenko said.
“Four separatist tanks, two armored personnel carriers, two howitzers, and an infantry combat vehicle were destroyed, and up to 200 insurgents were killed,” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Facebook. The death toll wasn’t independently confirmed.
In August, according to NATO and Ukraine, Russian forces helped rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions wage a counteroffensive to break out after they were encircled by Ukraine’s army.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries have also said Russia is probing their borders. NATO fighter jets intercepted a Russian military aircraft over the Baltic Sea, the latest in a series of similar incidents that have grown in frequency. NATO says its jets have intercepted Russian aircraft 100 times this year, three times last year’s total.
Ukraine’s military said Russia’s air force had put some of its units on high alert. A spokesman for Russia’s armed forces said by phone that he wasn’t able to comment.
Source : Bloomberg
