Russia-Ukraine Crisis : Russia ups the ante in Ukraine with eye on G20

Russia-Ukraine Crisis : Russia ups the ante in Ukraine with eye on G20

In Ukraine’s restive east, artillery explosions ring out and international monitors record dozens of shell bursts every evening. The ceasefire between Kiev and the Russian-backed separatists is fraying badly.

Signs of a flare-up in fighting began in July and Ukraine and its western allies are observing a more worrying development: a build-up of conventional Russian forces in Crimea and along the countries’ shared border.

Russia has positioned military units with thousands of troops to the north in Bryansk, to the east near Rostov, to the south in Crimea and to the west in the separatist Moldovan region of Transnistria. There are signs they are preparing for fighting.

Last week, people in Crimea began posting online about a large deployment of artillery and tanks in the north of the peninsula and within range of Ukraine. The internet there was temporarily shut down.

Ukrainian intelligence agencies say a Russian air defence regiment has been embedded with the separatists in Donbass. Launchers of the type that fired the Buk missile that downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014, killing all 298 people aboard, are again being deployed.

A photograph from Ilovaisk railway station shared online on Tuesday morning and verified by defence analysts interviewed for this article showed a train in the sidings, laden with heavy Russian tanks.

“Preparations for conventional conflict between Russia and Ukraine are accelerating, and the likelihood of open war is increasing rapidly,” the Institute for the Study of War, a US think-tank, wrote in a report last Thursday. On Monday that appeared to move a step closer. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, vowed that “exhaustive measures” would be taken against Kiev in reprisal for what Russia called an attempted terror attack by Ukraine’s defence ministry.

Russia-Ukraine Crisis : Russia ups the ante in Ukraine with eye on G20

“These are very, very clear signals from Russia that say they are willing to escalate and to push boundaries,” says Kathleen Weinberger, a Russia and Ukraine expert at the ISW. “We’re seeing reports of big military convoys being sent into the separatist areas, Russian troops being sent to the border and a lot more naval equipment in the Black Sea — including some of their most advanced subs, which have quite powerful ground attack cruise missiles.”

But, Ms Weinberger adds: “A lot of this is still unknown. Russia is showing us a very overt and threatening 20 per cent but leaving 80 per cent of what they’re doing unclear.”

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