Ukraine’s government launched an anti-terrorist operation on April 24 and attempted to regain control over the city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine. Russia threatened to retaliate and initiated war games on Ukraine’s eastern border. The nation is holding its breath to see what happens next just a month before a critical presidential election takes place on May 25.
Ukrainian forces moved in with tanks and armored personnel carriers to tighten their grip on Kremlin-backed rebels in the country’s restive eastern Donetsk Oblast on April 24, wiping out three rebel checkpoints on the outskirts of Sloviansk and swarming the embattled city. In doing so, at least five Kremlin-backed rebels but perhaps as many as seven were killed and one Ukrainian soldier was wounded in the anti-terror operation, security officials told the Kyiv Post.
The April 24 military push, an attempt by Ukraine to avenge a demoralizing defeat in its first try last week to purge the eastern region of separatists, resulted in the seizure of at least six of Ukraine’s armored vehicles and some of its soldiers switching allegiances. That, in turn, followed an April 13 ambush of Ukrainian counter-terrorism soldiers at the hands of Moscow-backed militants that led to the death of a Security Service captain and three more wounded.
It also threatened to escalate tensions between Kyiv and Moscow, who have traded barbs for a week since supposedly agreeing in Geneva on April 17 to deescalate the situation.
Russia responded shortly after news of the counter-terrorism operation in Sloviansk broke out. Its defense ministry announced war games to be carried out mere kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Video footage purported to show Russian military vehicles advancing toward the border spread across social media while Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia would “have to react.”
Ahead of the offensive action, in the early morning hours of April 24 Ukrainian forces repelled a group of about 70 armed pro-Russian insurgents who attempted to seize a military base that houses some 20 to 30 tanks and a weapons cache near Artemivsk.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said it took back the city council building in the southeastern city of Mariupol from Russian-backed rebels. There were conflicting reports as to who controlled the building when the Kyiv Post went to print.
The explosion of violence was the first since acting President Oleksandr Turchynov ended an Easter truce and ordered the restart of an anti-terror operation in the country’s east, where pro-Russian separatists and masked gunmen have seized government buildings, set up barricades along roads and taken several persons, including journalists, hostage in the past weeks. Two people, including a local Batkivshchyna politician, were allegedly murdered by the separatists. Their corpses were found drowned in a river near Sloviansk with signs of torture.
The original military plan for Sloviansk on April 24 was to recapture the city from separatists, including all government buildings they had taken over, a senior security official told the Kyiv Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The operation, however, was apparently suspended after a morning offensive fell short and as the government worked to reformulate the plan based on their latest intelligence from the eastern border, which showed heavy Russian troop movements, the official said.
The risk of Russian troops crossing the border has increased dramatically, according to the senior security official, who said seven people were dead as a result of the morning anti-terror operation in Sloviansk. Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry confirmed that five had been killed. “The separatists are panicking,” the official said.
Russian Defense Minister Shoigu confirmed that the situation in southeastern Ukraine had prompted Moscow to restart military drills along the border. Russia already has tens of thousands of troops stationed there. The war games will involve ground troops and air forces, Shoigu said before a ministerial meeting.
“We have to react to such developments. As of today, our battalion tactical combined-arms groups from the Southern and Western military districts have begun drills in the areas bordering with Ukraine,” Shoigu said. “The starting gun to use weapons against their (Ukraine’s) own civilians has already been fired. If today this military machine is not stopped, it will lead to a large number of dead and wounded.”
The minister added that the situation was not being helped by the “drills of NATO troops in Poland and the Baltic States.”
The Pentagon announced on April 22 that U.S. troops would be sent for military exercises in Eastern Europe to reassure its allies on Russia’s border. They arrived on April 24.
While at an event in St. Petersburg Russian President Vladimir Putin weighed in on the April 24 events, calling Kyiv’s counter-terrorist operation “a serious crime against its own people.”
Separatist leader and self-appointed mayor of Sloviansk Vyacheslav Ponomaryov has appealed to Putin to send “peacekeepers” to eastern Ukraine to help protect it from “Kyiv fascists” of nationalist group Right Sector who he believes are responsible for the killing of three pro-Russian rebels in a gun battle last weekend.
Bolstering his request were leaders of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, who have seized key government buildings in at least 10 eastern Ukrainian cities and according to Interfax Ukraine have announced a general mobilization of separatist forces in the eastern region in response to the anti-terror operation launched on April 24.
The leadership of the self-proclaimed republic told Interfax that “a combined arms operation has been launched in Sloviansk. This means only one thing: a civil war.”
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.
