Russia accused of training rebels
KIEV, Ukraine — Russia’s withdrawal of troops from its border with Ukraine has eased fears in Ukraine and the West that President Vladimir Putin will launch a full-scale invasion.
But the risk of war has not receded, only shifted in a different direction. Daily clashes, one involving 300 armed separatists attacking a border post, signal that the lowintensity conflict that began in March has moved into a higher gear.
Ukrainian officials charge that Russia is training, arming and dispatching irregular forces— many of them Russians, including a surprising number of Chechens— to the troubled eastern region to keep Ukraine permanently destabilized.
“They are sending in an irregular army,” said Anton Gerashenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian Interior Ministry. “They want this to become another Somalia.”
Perhaps the best proof of this was that at least eight of the rebels killed in the battle over the Donetsk airport on Monday and Tuesday were put in red coffins and taken to Russia for burial, Gerashenko said.
Denis Pusilin, the head of the high council of the socalled Donetsk People’s Republic, had put the number higher, saying that 34 felled militants were taken to Russia for burial.
The new phase in this war began just after the assault on the airport, when Pusilin sent a public plea to Putin to send in military help.
That night, a convoy of cars and vans approached one border crossing, where border guards engaged in a firefight and blocked them. But at another point, about 40 truckloads of armed insurgents made it in, allowing as many as 1,000 militants to cross in. Guards apparently were bribed to open the gates.
That number is “about right,” said Egor Pavlovich Firsov, a young member of parliament from Donetsk, the biggest city in eastern Ukraine.
The biggest clash occurred on Thursday, when border police reported that nearly 300 militants stormed a border crossing at Stanychno, just northeast of Luhansk, firing rocket-propelled grenades and
Russia pulled back troops from the border, but 1,000 militants allegedly crossed into Ukraine from Russia after a plea for help.
small weapons.
On Friday, about 80 militants equipped with mortars, rocketpropelled grenades and small arms attacked a border post at Dyakovo, about 50 miles south of Luhansk, firing about 50 mortar rounds, wounding three, one seriously, border police said.
There were other signs of Russian involvement. On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces downed an unmanned Russian-made Orlan 10 surveillance drone over one of their checkpoints. The Orlan 10 is capable of providing threedimensional maps — a sign that Russia now is willing to provide advanced technology to the rebel movement.
On Thursday, rebel forces shot down an Mi-8 helicopter near Slovyansk, killing a majorgeneral in the Ukrainian National Guard, six elite servicemen and five others. More than 50 soldiers and officers have been killed since midApril.