Russia accused of military build-up
ATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg denounced yesterday what he called a serious Russian military build-up both inside Ukraine and on the Russian side of the border and urged Moscow to pull back its troops.
Stoltenberg said Nato saw movement of troops, equipment, tanks, artillery and also of advanced air defence systems in violation of a ceasefire agreement.
Russia denies providing arms or troops to support a separatist pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine, which began after the removal of a Kremlin-oriented Ukrainian president by mass protests in February.
A ceasefire was agreed in early September, but fighting flared again recently.
Stoltenberg told reporters as he arrived for a meeting with EU defence ministers that he had information on a buildup inside Ukraine.
“But we also see a military build-up on the Russian side of the border... This is a serious
Nmilitary build-up and we call on Russia to pull back its troops,” he said. Russia denied similar accusations last week by Nato’s top military commander, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, who said Nato had seen military equipment arriving from Russia in regions of east Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist rebels.
General-Major Igor Konashenkov, a Russian Defence Ministry official, dismissed Breedlove’s comments last week as anti-Russian “hot air”.
Progress
Meanwhile, Germany’s foreign minister said he would assess the chances of making progress to end the crisis in Ukraine during talks in Moscow, but Russia said it saw no chance of a breakthrough.
Foreign Minister FrankWalter Steinmeier’s trip will be one of the first by a senior German official to Moscow since the crisis in Ukraine began, causing a deep rift between Russia and the West.
Violence is on the rise again in eastern Ukraine despite a more than two-month-old ceasefire, and Kiev and the West say Russia is sending in soldiers and weapons to help pro-Russian rebels in the east, a charge the Kremlin denies.
Speaking in Kiev, where he stopped off on his way to Moscow, Steinmeier said he wanted to see if talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Vladimir Putin in Brisbane at the weekend had improved the chances of an effective ceasefire in Ukraine.
He told a news conference with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk that he was worried that the fighting between government troops and pro-Russian separatists would undermine the ceasefire signed in the Belarussian capital, Minsk.
I will set out to see if these talks in Brisbane have created an atmosphere where we can work more concretely to implement the Minsk agreement,” he said.
Yatseniuk accused the rebels and Russia of violating the Minsk deal and added: “Russia should do what it signed up to and promised the whole world it would do.” – Reuters