All quiet on the Eastern Front
But sleepy Ukraine border crossing poised to become flashpoint
By
massing near the Ukrainian border, tens of thousands of Russian troops may be giving leaders in Kyiv and the West nightmares. But all was quiet Wednesday on Ukraine’s Eastern Front.
Several heavy trucks and a few cars passed through the southernmost border crossing between Russia and Ukraine, whose long-standing fraternal relations suffered a staggering blow when the ethnicRussian majority in Crimea voted over the weekend to abandon Kyiv and embrace Moscow.
In welcoming the Black Sea peninsula into the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin declared two days later that his country had no territorial ambitions in eastern Ukraine, where there is a large Russian minority. But nobody on the Ukrainian side of the equation has forgotten that on March 4, Putin had said the same thing about Crimea. Exactly two weeks after that, Putin was jubilantly telling Russia’s political elite that he had just gobbled up the peninsula. While not planning to incorporate eastern cities such as Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv into Russia, Putin warned on Wednesday that his country “will always defend its interests using political, diplomatic and legal means.”
In another triumph for Putin, who had defied Western demands throughout the month-long Ukrainian crisis, the acting government in Kyiv bowed to the inevitable Wednesday and said it was ordering all 25,000 of its troops and their dependents still in Crimea to return to the mainland where they would be given new places to live.
The plan was revealed after several hundred Russian troops working with a patchwork of self-styled local “self-defence militia” smashed the main gate and entered the Ukrainian navy’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol on Wednesday. The few Ukrainian sailors still inside the base left without their weapons, their uniforms or a fight.
Despite such tensions and global outrage over what Russia had done by occupying and annexing Crimea, Novoazovsk looked like the sleepiest of frontiers on Wednesday. But a lot more was going on than appeared to be the case at first glance.
Braving a stiff wind, a pair of Ukrainian soldiers gingerly mounted a fragile-looking, 30-metre-high cellphone tower to better stare into Russia to see if any tank or infantry units were headed their way. On both sides of the highway linking the Ukrainian city of Donetsk with the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a two-metre-deep anti-tank trench that was said to be at least 160 kilometres long had been freshly dug.
Planted above the trench was what looked like a new sign. It declared in Russian: “This is the border of Ukraine.”
A few kilometres to the east of Novoazovsk, where the bleak frontier between Russia and Ukraine reaches into the roiling Sea of Azov, not a soul was to be seen on either side of the anti-tank trench. However, out in the middle of nowhere, three men suddenly appeared in a beaten-up old Lada. After flashing cards identifying themselves as members of Ukraine’s border patrol they politely demanded documents from a small group of Canadian and Ukrainian visitors and asked what they were doing in this No Man’s Land.
From a distance, the tank trench looked imposing. But as any military combat engineer would have figured out in an eye blink, it would only take a few minutes for the chasm to be breached by tanks using temporary Bailey bridges.
A scenario mooted by military analysts in Moscow, if Russia decides to continue its Ukrainian campaign beyond Crimea, was that troops would likely enter near Novoazovsk and three other border crossings. However, Tatyana Sidekov, an ethnic Russian with Moldavian and British passports, said she and her Russian boyfriend had seen no Russian soldiers anywhere during the long drive from the Olympic city of Sochi to Ukraine. What was a bit unusual, she said, was that there was a fair bit of air traffic on the Russian side and that she had been detained by the Russians for two hours before being allowed into Ukraine.