MOSCOW — Supported by NATO satellite imagery showing Russian forces on the move in eastern Ukraine, its president accused Russia on Thursday of an invasion to aid the separatists, and his national security council ordered mandatory conscription to help counter what he called an “extremely difficult” threat.
The assertions by the president, Petro O. Poroshenko, came two days after he had met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in attempts to find a way to end the nearly six-month-old crisis roiling Ukraine. The conflict has escalated into the worst East-West confrontation since the Cold War, and the developments on the ground in the rebellious east along the Russian border suggested it would worsen.
Mr. Poroshenko scrapped a trip to Turkey to deal with the crisis and called an emergency meeting of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council. He dismissed Kremlin claims that any Russian soldiers in Ukraine were volunteers who had sacrificed their vacations to help the heavily pro-Russian east suffering oppression from the Kiev central government.
Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatseniuk of Ukraine urges the international community to freeze Russian assets, saying that Russian troops are on Ukrainian soil.
Publish Date August 28, 2014.
“Columns of heavy artillery, huge loads of arms and regular Russian servicemen came to the territory of Ukraine from Russia through the uncontrolled border area,” Mr. Poroshenko said. Mercenaries, along with regular servicemen, were trying to overrun positions held by the Ukrainian military, he said, according to a statement on his official website.
“The situation is certainly extremely difficult and nobody is going to simplify it,” Mr. Poroshenko said.
Anticipating the possibility of direct combat between Ukrainian and Russian troops, the council later announced it had reimposed mandatory military service, suspended last year.
Mr. Poroshenko spoke as NATO released satellite images to corroborate accusations that Russian forces were actively involved in Ukraine fighting. NATO also said that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers had joined the separatists battling the Ukrainian military.
“Over the past two weeks we have noted a significant escalation in both the level and sophistication of Russia’s military interference in Ukraine,” Brig. Gen. Nico Tak of the Netherlands, a senior officer in NATO’s military command, said in a statement. One image, dated Aug. 21, shows a Russian military convoy with self-propelled artillery moving in the Krasnodon region inside Ukraine. Another, dated Aug. 23, shows Russian self-propelled artillery units in firing positions near Krasnodon.
General Tak said the Russian soldiers were backing the separatists and “fighting with them.” He also said NATO estimated that about 20,000 Russian troops were deployed on Russian territory near the Ukrainian border.
The United States ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, said in a series of Twitter messages that Russian military assistance to the separatists had failed to help them sufficiently, “so now an increasing number of Russian troops are intervening directly in fighting on Ukrainian territory.” He also asserted that Russia had sent its newest air defense systems, including an effective weapon, the SA-22, into eastern Ukraine, “and is now directly involved in the fighting.”
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Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a rebel commander and the prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Thursday that Russians, including active-duty soldiers on leave, had been fighting against Ukrainian government forces. Credit Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
In Washington, President Obama condemned the Russian actions, calling them part of a pattern of behavior that began months ago, which he said had already led to Russia’s political and economic isolation because of Western sanctions. Mr. Obama told a news conference that he expected that the United States and its European partners would take further measures, although he did not characterize the latest Russia actions as an invasion, or say what addition sanctions might be imposed, or when.
Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the national security council, said that the Ukrainian military was planning a counteroffensive against the separatists and what he called “more and more Russians” but declined to provide details.
Separatists aided by Russia held the town of Novoazovsk, he said, with Ukrainian forces having retreated a day earlier. At a briefing in Kiev, Colonel Lysenko described that retreat as a regrouping of Ukrainian forces to better protect Mariupol, a key southern city now under threat.
Russia officials continued to deny sending soldiers or weapons to Ukraine. But the leader of the main separatist group in southeastern Ukraine said that up to 4,000 Russians, including active-duty soldiers currently on leave, had been fighting against Ukrainian government forces, Russian television reported.
“There are active soldiers fighting among us who preferred to spend their vacation not on the beach, but with us, among their brothers, who are fighting for their freedom,” Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a rebel commander and the prime minister of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, said in an interview on Russian state-run television.
Mr. Zakharchenko said that 3,000 to 4,000 Russians had fought alongside separatists since the conflict erupted.
That assertion evaded the issue of direct Russian involvement by painting the soldiers as volunteers. It suggests, however, that Moscow still seeks to organize and to some extent control a force that could be operated at arm’s length with a backbone of local participation.
While the United States and its European allies have condemned Russia, they have not responded to criticism that the Ukrainian tactics against the separatists have included shelling civilian areas in rebel strongholds. The United Nations has estimated that 2,000 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine violence.
The United Nations Security Council met in an emergency session on Ukraine on Thursday afternoon, during which the United States and other Western allies expressed outrage at what they described as a pattern of deceitful Russian aggression.
“Instead of listening, instead of heeding the demands of the international community and the rules of the international order, at every step, Russia has come before this Council to say everything except the truth,” said Samantha Power, the United States ambassador. “It has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied. So we have learned to measure Russia by its actions and not by its words.”
Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, did not deny that Russians were fighting in eastern Ukraine but said they were volunteers. He said the Ukrainian government was “waging war against its own people.”
Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Moscow of opening a new southern front to relieve pressure on the besieged insurgent redoubts of Donetsk and Luhansk farther north.
A separatist defeat in the eastern part of Ukraine would deliver a significant domestic political blow to Mr. Putin, whose popularity in Russia soared when he annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula last March. But the confrontation in the south raised the specter for the first time in months of a direct confrontation between Ukraine’s forces and those of its giant neighbor.
In eastern Ukraine, fighting intensified in cities and villages along the path of the forces advancing from the Russian border in what Western and Ukrainian officials have called a multipronged attack. The Ukrainian soldiers in the region southeast of Donetsk are now surrounded, as pro-Russian forces appear to control a road to the west.
The armored columns that captured Novoazovsk and now threaten Mariupol, far from the fighting around Luhansk and Donetsk, serve the separatist aim of diverting Ukrainian forces to deal with that new threat. Western analysts say the advance may also be the start of a ground offensive to seize Ukrainian territory for a land route connecting Russia to Crimea.
Mr. Zakharchenko, who says he has Ukrainian citizenship, took over as prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic this month, replacing Alexandr Borodai, a Russian. Several other Russians who had figured prominently in the rebel ranks, including the military commander Igor Strelkov, have also dropped from sight in recent weeks.
In the interview with the official satellite channel Rossiya 24, Mr. Zakharchenko said that many former professional Russian soldiers had come to Ukraine as volunteers, out of a sense of duty. “Many of them have gone home, but the majority have remained here,” Mr. Zakharchenko said. “Unfortunately, some have been killed.”
Well, there are also other people on both sides (the non-Nazi ordinary Ukrainian Army servicemen and the non-nationalist, left-wing volunteer formations in the East), but they are not defining the shape of the conflict.
