Reuters/AFP/Washington/Kiev
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appealed for more US assistance, including arms, in a warmly received appearance before the US Congress yesterday, but the latest offer of American help did not include the weaponry he is seeking.
“Please understand me correctly. Blankets, night-vision goggles are also important. But one cannot win the war with blankets.” He added: “Even more, we cannot keep the peace with a blanket.”
Drawing cheers from members who want to arm the former Soviet state, Poroshenko declared his forces “need more military equipment, both lethal and non-lethal – urgently need”.
Given the honour of a speech to the joint houses of Congress reflecting US support for his country’s fight against Russian-backed separatists, he said Washington should slap more sanctions on Moscow and give Ukraine a special security status.
As he was speaking, President Barack Obama’s administration pledged $53mn in aid, most of it security-related but not weapons.
It included counter-mortar radar detection equipment used to locate incoming artillery fire, as well as patrol and transport vehicles, surveillance equipment, explosive detection gear, armour, rations and de-mining equipment.
Nato, wary of being drawn into a proxy conflict with Russia in the east European state, has decided against sending arms to Ukraine, which has frequently been outgunned by Russian-supported separatists in the eastern border areas.
Poroshenko put the struggle in Ukraine in historical terms, calling it “the most heroic story of the last decade”.
“The outcome of today’s war will determine whether we will be forced to accept the reality of a dark, torn and bitter Europe as part of a new world order,” he said. “I strongly encourage the United States to give Ukraine a special security and defence status which reflects the highest level of interaction with non-Nato allies.”
He insisted that Ukraine would never accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which he called “one of the most cynical acts of treachery in modern history”.
Poroshenko, who took over as president in June and hopes to consolidate his authority in a parliamentary election on October 26, visited the White House for talks with Obama after his address to Congress.
The pro-western leader called a ceasefire on September 5 after heavy battlefield losses that Kiev ascribed to Russian military intervention on behalf of the rebels.
But it is a shaky truce.
Ukraine’s prime minister on Wednesday told government forces to remain on full battle alert as fighting in the rebel-held city of Donetsk killed at least two civilians.
Moscow denies its military units have been involved in the Ukraine fighting.
Kiev accused Russia yesterday of massing around 4,000 troops on the border of Russian-annexed Crimea and Ukraine, as multiple Crimean residents also reported seeing troop movements.
“According to our information, almost all military units of the Russian Federation stationed in the north of occupied Crimea ... were pushed to the administrative border with Ukraine along with all their equipment and ammunition,” said National Security and Defence Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko.
He said that the units, totalling about 4,000 troops, were deployed in “small tactical groups” along the border in Crimea, the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in March.
Ukraine’s border service said yesterday that Russia was also using drones for air reconnaissance, with border guards reporting three cases of the use of drones in the last 24 hours, one near Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, and two on the Crimean border.
Crimea residents, who asked for their surnames not to be published, told AFP they had noticed recent Russian troop movements going towards the border.
“Tanks and some types of artillery were clearly seen moving on open railway cars through the station of Krasnoperekopsk towards Ukraine. I saw them myself,” Sanie, a resident of the town of Krasnoperekopsk close to the border, told AFP.
She said that her friends in the village of Ishun, close to the highway that crosses the border, had also called her last week to say that “military hardware was going past all the time ... about 20 at a time”.
“There were several of these convoys. The vehicles were closed and they couldn’t see what was inside: soldiers or equipment,” Sanie said.
A resident of the town of Dzhankoy southeast of the border, Muzafer, confirmed that he had spotted troop movements around a week ago.
“It’s definitely the case that military vehicles were going towards the border with soldiers,” he told AFP.
Yesterday an AFP reporter saw three military vehicles carrying Grad multiple rocket launchers outside Crimea’s main city of Simferopol.
A regional Tatar activist who asked not to be named said inhabitants of the village of Chongar, which straddles the border, reported seeing intensified Russian movements in the last few days including vehicles carrying Grad rocket systems and eight military transport helicopters.
The same activist said inhabitants of the village of Strelkovoye, which is on a spit formally on the Ukraine side, but where Russian paratroopers have been based since March, had also seen Russians move in more armoured vehicles and personnel in the last three to four days.
Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said earlier this week that Moscow planned to boost troop numbers in Crimea because of what he described as a deteriorating situation in Ukraine and a build-up of foreign troops near its border.
Russia is deeply concerned at Nato’s move eastwards and President Vladimir Putin has accused the West of provoking the crisis in Ukraine in order to “revive” the military bloc.
Nato this month agreed to boost its presence in eastern Europe, and the United States is currently staging war games in western Ukraine, along with another 14 countries.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based in Crimea and Moscow announced in July that it had begun expanding and modernising it with new ships and submarines.
In weekend elections, Putin’s ruling United Russia Party won more than 70% of the vote in Crimea’s regional parliament, a poll the United States rejected as illegitimate.
BBC reporters ‘badly beaten’, with camera equipment smashed
and ‘electronically wiped’ in southern Russia
A team of BBC journalists was beaten and their camera smashed in southern Russia, where they were looking into reports of Russian soldiers killed while on secret deployments near Ukraine, the broadcaster said yesterday.
The three reporters were working in the southern city of Astrakhan when they were “assaulted by unidentified men in a co-ordinated attack”, the BBC said in a statement. “Our staff were badly beaten, their camera destroyed and then taken.”
BBC spokesman James Hardy added separately: “All are OK.”
“The cameraman is continuing to receive treatment for concussion and other injuries,” he added in written remarks.
After the assault the journalists were questioned at a police station.
They later “discovered that recording equipment – which was in their vehicle, at the police station – had been electronically wiped”.
The incident is “clearly part of a co-ordinated attempt to stop accredited news journalists reporting a legitimate news story”, the BBC said, calling for a thorough probe.
Astrakhan police spokesman Pyotr Rusanov told Russian news agencies that authorities had launched an enquiry into a robbery and were looking for assailants.
“This was a disturbing day for us,” tweeted one of the reporters, Steve Rosenberg, posting his interview with a woman in Astrakhan region who said her brother Konstantin Kuzmin, a Russian serviceman, was killed after deployment to the Russia-Ukraine border.
According to Russian rights organisation Zabytyi Polk (Forgotten Regiment), Kuzmin was one of many Russian soldiers stationed in Chechnya who was sent to the Rostov region, which borders Ukraine, and then killed under mysterious circumstances.
Russia has enforced a virtual blackout on any information concerning the deployment of regular troops to Ukraine.
According to rights campaigners, at least 200 Russian servicemen might have died in eastern Ukraine where fighting between pro-Russia separatists and Kiev forces has claimed nearly 2,900 lives since April.
The Russian government denies ever sending the army to Ukraine, while separatist leaders have said that Russian soldiers have participated in the fighting while on vacation.
Russian military commanders have told families that their husbands and sons are participating in military drills close to the Ukrainian border but some have admitted in private conversations that soldiers had been sent “outside Russia”.
Several journalists covering the story have been attacked or harassed in recent weeks.
Last month Lev Shlosberg, a local opposition lawmaker and journalist in the western city of Pskov was hospitalised with head and eye injuries after an attack by three unidentified men.
Shlosberg was one of the first people to report on the deployment of local paratroopers to Ukraine.
His newspaper Pskovskaya Guberniya said that dozens of Pskov-based soldiers had been killed.
Other Russian journalists investigating reports of soldiers’ deaths were also threatened by men near Pskov last month, and had the tyres of their car punctured.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitors the Ukraine conflict, condemned the attack on the BBC as “totally unacceptable” calling it only “the latest in a spate of recent attacks against journalists who investigated issues related to the conflict in eastern Ukraine”.
