A member of Ukrainian volunteer battalion Dnipro looks through binoculars near the small southern Ukrainian city of Novoazovsk. (Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images)
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of stepping up military activity in the annexed territory of Crimea and sending in troops to help separatists near a key seaport in southeastern Ukraine.
In a briefing Wednesday, Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military, said that Russian troops are increasing their activity in Crimea, the autonomous Ukrainian peninsula that was taken over by pro-Russian separatists and annexed by Moscow in March. According to NATO, Russia has already massed about 20,000 combat-ready troops along Ukraine’s border.
Lysenko cited Ukrainian military intelligence reports as showing that Russian units are conducting surveillance with drones from Crimea. He said three Russian military helicopters have violated Ukrainian airspace from the territory.
Heavy shelling and fighting continued, meanwhile, near the southern city of Novoazovsk, a port on the Sea of Azov, near where the Ukrainian military said Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers entered the country on Monday. Ukraine says that Russia in recent days has attempted to create a “second front” there, adding to rebel strongholds in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Lysenko said Russian troops working alongside separatists have taken over villages north of Novoazovsk, as well as the city of Starobeshevo, where the local hospital was destroyed.
Ukraine accused Russia of launching a new military incursion across its eastern border, as hopes quickly fade that talks between their two presidents might mark a turning point. (Reuters)
Compounding the Russian threat to the country, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatensyuk, is a purported Russian plan to cut off gas supplies to Europe that go through Ukraine this winter.
“We know about the plans to completely block the transit [of gas] to E.U. member states,” Yatensyuk told government ministers in Kiev, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN reported. “We know about the plans to disable all energy resources going to Ukraine.” He called the energy situation in Ukraine very difficult, the agency said.
The developments came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held bilateral talks after a regional summit in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
Hopes for a breakthrough had already dimmed, but a Ukrainian announcement earlier in the day that its forces had captured 10 Russian paratroopers in the Donetsk region — combined with the release of video evidence — made the two-hour, one-on-one discussion even more difficult.
Following the meeting, Poroshenko said a “road map” would be prepared to end the fighting between troops and pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported.
Afterward, Putin said he had told Poroshenko that Kiev must take the initiative in working out a peace agreement with the separatists in eastern Ukraine. “We talked about the need to end bloodshed as soon as possible, about the need to shift toward political resolution of all issues,” Putin told journalists in Minsk, according to the Reuters news agency. “Russia, for its part, will do everything to support this peace process if it starts.”
But the capture of the Russian paratroopers left Moscow more exposed as a participant in the fighting in Ukraine than it has sought to portray itself. Having previously derided Kiev’s claims of Russian intervention in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine, Moscow this time simply claimed that the paratroopers had entered Ukraine by mistake. Putin noted that Ukrainian soldiers had wandered into Russia earlier this month.
At his news briefing Wednesday, Lysenko showed a new video of the Russian paratroopers. In it, nine of the 10, wearing camouflage sweatshirts, stepped forward and gave their names and division number. The deputy commander of the men said they had “illegally come into the territory of Ukraine” for what they thought was a military exercise and were captured. Afterward, their documents and telephones were seized and they were detained. The commander, Sgt. Vladimir Sevasteev, said they wanted to be sent home to Russia.
“Please help us,” the deputy commander said. “We don’t want to shoot at Ukrainian people. We are here illegally.”
A soldier who did not appear in the video was a driver who was injured in the fighting and is being treated at a military hospital, Lysenko said.
The incursion — or act of unintentional trespassing — followed Russian moves that have provoked a strong reaction among American officials.
“The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-
directed counteroffensive may be underway,” tweeted the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt.
“What we have seen are repeated provocations by the Russian regime to further escalate tensions in the region,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. He called Russian intervention in Ukraine, including the sending of a humanitarian convoy without Kiev’s permission, “a pretty flagrant escalation of this situation.”
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “These incursions indicate a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely under way in Donetsk and Luhansk.” She added: “Clearly, that is of deep concern to us, but we’re also concerned by the Russian government’s unwillingness to tell the truth, even as its soldiers are found 30 miles inside Ukraine.”
At their meeting, Putin and Poroshenko did reach an agreement on how to distribute aid to civilians in the separatist Luhansk region, the Interfax news agency reported. But Putin said that Russia could not discuss the terms of a cease-fire with Ukraine.
Russia may not want to talk cease-fire terms, but it also isn’t interested in breaking up Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
“We are not interested in breaking up the state,” Lavrov said, when asked at a youth forum why Russia has not yet recognized the rebels’ self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics as a state.
But Russia’s permanent mission to NATO did say Wednesday that it would take steps to prevent NATO’s encroachment eastward.
Finland’s president said Tuesday that he would consider seeking NATO membership for his country in light of Russia’s recent apparent incursions into Ukraine.
Ukrainian representatives are expected to attend a series of meetings with European Union members in the upcoming days, including on Aug. 30, when Poroshenko will attend a meeting of the European Commission in Brussels.
Poroshenko has previously expressed interest in joining the E.U. sometime after 2020.
They agreed to resume talks on sending gas through Ukraine to Europe, Putin said afterward — a conversation that ran off the rails at various stages after Russia jacked up gas prices for Kiev by more than 40 percent this spring and Ukraine threatened to block all Russian gas exports through Ukrainian territory.
At the public session of the Minsk meeting, which included representatives from the Eurasian Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, as well as the European Union, Putin virtually ignored the conflict in Ukraine, except to say that he is against military escalation, and focused on economic concerns.
He warned of the potential harm to Russia and its customs union partners if Ukraine proceeds with a trade agreement with the European Union. Moscow fears that European manufacturers would ship goods through Ukraine, relabel them and avoid customs duties. Putin threatened Ukraine with unspecified consequences if it moves ahead on the trade pact. Poroshenko has said he wants the Ukrainian parliament to ratify the agreement in September.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, said Wednesday that Ukraine had absolutely no intention of renegotiating the agreement to allay Russia’s concerns.
“Our Russian colleagues should not engage in wishful thinking,” Klimkin tweeted. “We will not change the text of the agreement. We will ratify and implement it.”
That trade agreement has been at the center of the Ukrainian crisis. When, under Russian pressure, then-President Viktor Yanukovych backed away last fall from signing it, the protests that led to his ouster broke out. After he fled to Russia in February, Moscow’s forces seized Crimea, and the separatist movement in the east sprang into action.
Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s top security and foreign affairs official, told reporters that the participants in the first, broader meeting had not “directly discussed” the Ukrainian videos depicting the apprehended soldiers.
But the recordings were revealing.
One paratrooper named Sergei Smirnov said in an interrogation video that he was a “contractor” in the Russian army who had come to Ukraine “for training.” He added that he did not know he was in Ukraine until “we went through a village and saw a Ukrainian tank.”
Lysenko, the Ukrainian military spokesman, told a briefing in Kiev on Tuesday that the detained Russian soldiers said they took a train to the Rostov region in Russia on Aug. 23 and joined “a march” around 3 a.m. the following day in a column of dozens of armored personnel carriers. The soldiers said that only the commanders knew they were going into Ukraine; the soldiers thought they were going for training.
Asked about the assertion by Russian officials that the troops had accidentally crossed the border, Lysenko said: “If elite troops do not know topography and do not know their locality, I can say nothing about that. . . . We believe that was not a mistake.” Rather, he said, it was “a special task executed.”
The soldiers have been “detained” but are not prisoners, Lysenko said. Ukraine has launched a criminal investigation into their activities.
Lysenko also said that for the first time since the conflict began, Ukrainian border guards were fired at on Monday in the Luhansk region by two Russian military helicopters. Four border guards died and three were injured, he said.
The incident came just days after Russia sent a convoy of humanitarian aid trucks — whose purpose, even now, is murky — into Ukrainian territory, provoking international condemnation. The Russian government said Monday that it would send a second convoy, and its path may be smoother if the agreement between Putin and Poroshenko sticks.
William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
Annie Gowen is The Post’s India bureau chief and has reported for the Post throughout South Asia and the Middle East.
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