You're reading: Ukraine’s spymaster shows off another captured ‘Russian officer’

Ukraine's SBU security service on July 29 showed a video of another man claimed to be a Russian military officer captured by Ukrainian forces in the country's war-torn east.


The SBU displayed
his identification documents and a recorded interview of him, who it identified
as Vladimir Starkov at a news conference in Kyiv on July 29.

In the
video, the man said that he was a Russian citizen, and that he had been
performing military service in Novocherkassk, a city in Russia’s Rostov Oblast
that borders Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.

According
to SBU chief Vasyl Hrytsak, the evidence provided by Starkov, as well as
documents and notebooks confiscated from him, revealed a “well-oiled mechanism”
of Russian cooperation with separatist groups in Ukraine’s east.

“The
mechanism is this: Russian soldiers are offered to continue their service in
(separatist-controlled parts of) Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, with the promise of
tripling their salary,” Hrytsak said. “Those who agree have all the documents
that can help identify them as Russian military personnel taken from them – their
passport, military ID, dog tags.”

After
crossing the Russian-Ukrainian border, Starkov received a military ID with the
rank of major from the Donetsk-based separatists. He also assumed the maiden
name of his wife, Ovsyannikov, instead of Starkov.

According
to Starkov, all Russian soldiers coming to Ukraine’s east take fake names,
Hrytsak said.

In the
video shown by the SBU, Starkov said he was told he would be promoted if he
agreed to serve in Novocherkassk. But when he arrived there he was told he was
going to Ukraine, he said. He said about 2,000-3,000 Russian officers are now
in Ukraine’s east.

Starkov
was one of two men caught near the village of Berezove, about a 30-minute drive
southwest of the separatist-held city of Donetsk, on July 26. The two had been
in a truck full of arms that strayed into Ukrainian-held territory while
travelling to Russian-separatist positions near the southern Donetsk port city
of Mariupol, Ukraine’s security forces said.

Pictures
later circulated in the media of the large amount of weapons Ukrainian security
forces said were found in the truck, including grenades, portable grenade
launchers and bullets of various calibers.

Ukraine’s
Border Guard Service later issued a statement that one of the men had been
identified as a member of the Russian armed forces, with the rank of major. The
other man belonged to a local separatist fighter squad, the service said.

The
capture of Starkov lends yet more credence to Ukraine’s long-standing assertions
that Russia is deeply involved in the conflict in the east of the country. Kyiv
says Russian equipment, weapons, supplies and regular troops are regularly sent
across the border from Russia into separatist-held Ukraine to fuel the
fighting. This week, former SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said on Ukrainian
television that Russia operates more than 30 military training camps inside
Ukraine. Western officials say that Russia’s involvement includes
command-and-control as well as logistics, all of which constitute direct
involvement in the war in which nearly 7,000 people have been killed since
mid-April 2014, according to U.N. data.

Russia
continually denies such claims, but a mounting body of photographic and video
evidence, much of it gathered from Russian soldiers’ own social media posts,
indicates that the Russian regular army has indeed been directly involved in
the conflict in Ukraine.

Kyiv Post
staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].