Is Russia on the warpath in Ukraine?
The Kremlin’s massive military build-up at the Ukrainian border has sparked fears of renewed hostilities,
Images of troops, tanks and heavy artillery on the move in south-western Russia in recent days have stoked fears of renewed hostilities in eastern Ukraine.
The deployment reportedly includes several military units, tanks and heavy artillery. Last week, General Ruslan Khomchak, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, told the country’s Parliament that Russia had amassed 28 tactical battalions along the border, which would amount to up to 25,000 troops.
Showing the anxiety that has been building about the Russian manoeuvres, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday urged Nato to speed up his country’s membership in the alliance, saying it was the only way to end fighting with pro-Russia separatists.
A 2015 ceasefire between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian government troops in eastern Ukraine had largely held until last month, when four Ukrainian troops were killed on one day in the biggest escalation since last summer.
US President Joe Biden has called Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian leader, to reiterate his support for Kyiv in the face of Moscow’s hostile actions.
Boris Johnson has also voiced the United Kingdom’s ‘‘unwavering support’’ for Kyiv while Josep Borrel, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has noted the bloc’s ‘‘severe concern’’ about Russia’s military build-up.
Russia’s sabre-rattling in the region is not unusual but the scale of the ongoing military manoeuvres has prompted Ukrainian officials to speak about a potential large-scale invasion.
Zelenskiy has accused the Kremlin of
‘‘muscle-flexing’’ to intimidate Kyiv while Ukraine’s military intelligence last week publicly warned about the danger of an incursion, saying that Russia was getting
prepared to ‘‘provoke our country to respond to hostile actions along the front line’’.
Russia has dismissed the concerns, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that the nation’s army will do as it pleases within its borders ‘‘to ensure our country’s security’’.
Russian forensic investigative group Conflict Intelligence Team, which made its name in 2014 by using social media to find proof of Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine, began to notice an unusually widespread military movement about two weeks ago.
‘‘We haven’t seen a build-up this massive since 2015,’’ CIT’s founder Ruslan Leviev told the Telegraph.
‘‘This doesn’t look like military drills at all.’’
In recent days Leviev and his colleagues, with the help of Russia’s opensource databases with information such as about rail cargo, pointed to numerous military deployments moving across the country towards Ukraine including the shipment of T-72B3 tanks all the way from Siberia.
On Tuesday, CIT released photos and official travel logs, showing an elite paratrooper division from Pskov, one of Russia’s most combat-ready units, travelling by rail to the Russia-occupied Crimea.
Russia reportedly deployed a relatively small but well-trained and equipped force to eastern Ukraine at several points in 2014 and 2015, reversing the tide of the war in the separatists’ favour but the authorities then actually took the trouble to conceal Moscow’s involvement.
This time, according to Leviev, Russia is flaunting its troops, which leads him to believe that the main purpose of the buildup is to intimidate Ukraine rather than prepare an actual incursion.
‘‘You almost get the feeling that the Defence Ministry wants it all to be seen and filmed, so that people in Ukraine will get the message.’’
Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Kennan Institute who focuses on the Russian military, wrote in an op-ed last week that Moscow appears to ‘‘use hard military power in an effort to pressure Ukraine politically, and equally signal to Ukraine’s partners in the West’’.
Protracted talks between Ukraine, Russia and Russia’s proxies in eastern Ukraine stalled in recent months, and Russia’s sabre-rattling, according to Kofman, could be intended to pressure Ukraine and Western counterparts over the lack of progress in implementing the 2015 peace accords.