Russia’s Defense Ministry announced new military exercises involving some 8,500 soldiers in several regions near the southern Ukrainian border on March 13, a day after Ukraine’s newly appointed National Security and Defense Council Secretary Andriy Parubiy warned that he has “every reason to believe” Moscow will give the order to invade and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that Russia would suffer if it didn’t ease off.
Russia’s defense ministry said that artillery such as rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons would be used by infantry, tanks and other troops during the exercises in Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov regions.
“Ukraine now faces the threat of a full-scale invasion,” Parubiy said at a press conference in Kyiv on March 12.
He said that Ukraine would rely on military, police and a newly formed National Guard of 20,000 volunteers to protect is borders.
Parubiy estimates that more than 80,000 Russian troops have amassed along the Ukrainian border, along with as many as 270 tanks, 180 armored combat vehicles, 380 pieces of artillery, 18 rocket launchers, 140 combat aircraft, 90 military helicopters and 19 combat boats and ships.
Although the Russian government had promised to withdraw its troops conducting military drills near Ukraine’s borders, Parubiy said that the number of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border has actually increased in recent days.
On Feb. 27, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea, a peninsula that juts out from continental Ukraine into the Black Sea. Since then, the number of Russian troops in Crimea has steadily increased, giving the Kremlin full military control of the entire peninsula.
Speaking to the German parliament on Thursday, Merkel criticized Moscow’s aggressive actions, saying “the territorial integrity of Ukraine cannot be called into question.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, if Russia continues on its course of the past weeks, it will not only be a catastrophe for Ukraine,” she said. “We, also as neighbors of Russia, would not only see it as a threat. And it would not only change the European Union’s relationship with Russia. No, this would also cause massive damage to Russia, economically and politically.”
Parubiy said that Ukraine’s Interior Ministry is seeing the first traces of the Russian incursion into continental Ukraine: In the early hours of the morning on March 12, the Security Service of Ukraine apprehended several people in southern Kherson Oblast who were conducting “investigative intelligence activity.” Their leader was a citizen of the Russian Federation traveling under a stolen Ukrainian passport. After being arrested, he admitted that he traveled to Kherson to collect intelligence information, including the location of Ukrainian troops.
On March 11, the Security Service of Ukraine said investigators detained a Russian saboteur in the Donetsk region and accused him of preparing explosives and planning other acts of diversion.
Parubiy characterized the agitators as “special forces” who are members of the most “elite ranks of the Russian army.” In addition to trained military personnel, Parubiy counted professional actors among the agitators who have infiltrated Ukraine, saying that they had been hired to make the sabotage more convincing. He said that agitators have even infiltrated some of the many self-defense groups that have formed on Kyiv’s Independence Square.
Parubiy announced that Ukraine’s Border Service prevented 3,700 Russian citizens from entering the country under suspicion that they were sent to carry out “extremist activity.”
He noted that provocations are most likely to occur in the Kherson, Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, saying that Kherson and Odessa are subject to subversive activity because of their proximity to the Russian-backed breakaway state of Transnistria. Luhansk and Donetsk share long stretches of border with Russia.
Parubiy announced that the National Security and Defense Council on March 13 will submit a law to parliament establishing a Ukrainian National Guard in response to security threats in the south and east. The National Guard will protect Ukraine’s borders, work to ensure domestic security, and prevent terrorist activity, broadening “the functions…of the current Ministry of the Interior troops.”
Parubiy said that the National Guard will enroll 20,000 volunteers from around the country, who will begin training on March 13. Many of these will be conscripted from the self-defense forces that defended Independence Square from riot police officers for months: “We call upon all the groups that were on the Maidan” to defend Ukraine.
On March 13, the National Security and Defense Council will also submit a bill to the Verkhovna Rada calling for the armed forces to be mobilized.
Parubiy’s announcement comes after acting President Oleksandr Turchynov expressed concern about the current state of the Ukrainian military on March 11, saying that it had only about 6,000 combat-ready infantry.
Although many believe that Ukraine would be powerless to stop a Russian attack on its eastern border, Parubiy said that Ukrainian “units are now placed in such a way that we can repel an attack from any direction.”
Parubiy also used the press conference to remind the United States and the United Kingdom of their obligations as guarantors of Ukraine’s security, according to the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine forfeited its nuclear arsenal in return for security assurances. The West has been reluctant to intervene militarily to stop aggression and few believe that Europe and the U.S. will risk war with Russia to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Kyiv Post staff writer Isaac Webb can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at @isaacdwebb. Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.
