NOVOAZOVSK,
Ukraine — Tanks, artillery and infantry have crossed from Russia into
an unbreached part of eastern Ukraine in recent days, attacking
Ukrainian forces and causing panic and wholesale retreat not only in
this small border town but also a wide section of territory, in what
Ukrainian and Western military officials described on Wednesday as a
stealth invasion.
The
attacks outside this city and in an area to the north essentially have
opened a new, third front in the war in eastern Ukraine between
government forces and pro-Russian separatists, along with the fighting
outside the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Exhausted,
filthy and dismayed, Ukrainian soldiers staggering out of Novoazovsk
for safer territory said Tuesday they were cannon fodder for the forces
coming from Russia. As they spoke, tank shells whistled in from the east
and exploded nearby.
Some
of the retreating Ukrainian soldiers appeared unwilling to fight. The
commander of their unit, part of the Ninth Brigade from Vinnytsia, in
western Ukraine, barked at the men to turn around, to no effect. “All
right,” the commander said. “Anybody who refuses to fight, sit apart
from the others.” Eleven men did, while the others returned to the city.
Some
troops were in a full, chaotic retreat: a city-busload of them careened
past on the highway headed west, purple curtains flapping through
windows shot out by gunfire. A Ukrainian military spokesman said
Wednesday the army still controlled Novoazvosk but that 13 soldiers had
died in the fighting.
The
behavior of the Ukrainian forces corroborated assertions by Western and
Ukrainian officials that Russia, despite its strenuous denials, is
orchestrating a new counteroffensive to help the besieged separatists of
the Donetsk People’s Republic, who have been reeling from aggressive
Ukrainian military advances in recent weeks.
“Russia
is clearly trying to put its finger on the scale to tip things back in
favor of its proxies,” said a senior American official. “Artillery
barrages and other Russian military actions have taken their toll on the
Ukrainian military.”
The
Obama administration, which has placed increasingly punitive economic
sanctions on Russia because of the Ukraine crisis, asserted over the
past few days that the Russians had sent new columns of tanks and armor
across the border.
“These
incursions indicate a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely
underway,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
At the department’s daily briefing in Washington, Ms. Psaki also
criticized what she called the Russian government’s “unwillingness to
tell the truth” that its military had sent soldiers as deep as 30 miles
inside Ukraine territory.
Ms. Psaki apparently was referring to videos of captured Russian soldiers, distributed by Ukraine’s government on Tuesday, that directly challenged
President Vladimir V. Putin’s assertions that Russia is a mere
bystander in the conflict. The videos were publicized just as Mr. Putin
was meeting with his Ukraine counterpart, Petro O. Poroshenko, in
Belarus.
Russian
forces have been trying to help the separatists break the siege of
Luhansk and have been fighting to open a corridor to Donetsk from the
Ukrainian-Russian border, Western officials say.
To
the south, Russia has been backing a separatist push toward the
southern town of Mariupol, a major port on the Sea of Azov, according to
Western and Ukrainian officials. The Russian aim, one Western official
said, is to open a new front that would divert Ukrainian forces from
Donetsk and Luhansk and to possibly seize an outlet to the sea in the
event that Russia tries to establish a separatist enclave in eastern
Ukraine.
Some
Western officials fear the move might even be a step in what they
suspect is a broader Russian strategy to carve out a land link to
Crimea, the strategic Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in March,
setting off Moscow’s worst crisis with the West since the Cold War.
The
Russian military’s use of artillery from locations within Ukraine is of
special concern to Western military officials, who say Russian
artillery has already been used to shell Ukrainian forces near Luhansk.
And along with the antiaircraft systems operated by separatists or
Russian forces inside Ukraine, the artillery has the potential to alter
the balance of power in the struggle for control of eastern Ukraine.
Russia
has denied that it has intervened militarily in Ukraine and the
separatists have asserted that they are using captured Ukrainian
equipment. But American officials say they are confident that the
artillery in Ukraine’s Krasnodon area is Russia’s since Ukrainian forces
have not penetrated that deeply into that separatist-controlled region.
American officials also say the separatists have no experience in using
such weaponry.
“We
judge that self-propelled artillery is operated by Russians rather than
separatists since no separatist training on this artillery has occurred
to date,” an Obama administration official said.
The
United States has photographs that show the Russian artillery moved
into Ukraine, American officials say. One photo dated Aug. 21, shown to a
reporter from The New York Times, shows Russian military units moving
self-propelled artillery into Ukraine. Another photo, dated Aug. 23,
shows the artillery in firing positions in Ukraine.
Advanced
air defenses, including systems not known to be in the Ukrainian
arsenal, have also been used to blunt the Ukrainian military’s air
power, American officials say. In addition, they said, the Russian
military routinely flies drones over Ukraine and shares the intelligence
with the separatists.
The
Ukrainian retreat from the border area near Novoazovsk, which began on
Tuesday, came as Mr. Putin told Mr. Poroshenko that the Ukrainian
insurgency an internal matter and that the Ukrainian government needed
to negotiate a cease-fire.
On
the highway here, Sgt. Ihor Sharapov, a soldier with the Ukrainian
border patrol unit, said he had seen tanks drive across the border but
marked with flags of the separatist movement here, the Donetsk People’s
Republic.
The
group that attacked the city crossed from Russia, and though some
soldiers were convinced they had spent two days fighting the Russians,
others said they had no way of knowing who was inside the tanks, or the
identities of the infantry who crossed the border and advanced toward
this town.
“I
tell you they are Russians, but this is what proof I have,” said Sgt.
Aleksei Panko, holding up his thumb and index finger to form a zero.
Sergeant Panko estimated that about 60 armored vehicles crossed near
Novoazovsk. “This is what happened: they crossed the border, took up
positions and started shooting.”
The
Ukrainian Vinnytsia brigade met the cross-border advance over the six
miles of countryside separating Novoazovsk from the Russian border, but
later retreated to the western edge of town along the Rostov-Mariupol
highway, where soldiers were collapsed in exhaustion on the roadside.
“This is now a war with Russia,” Sergeant Panko said.
The
counteroffensive that Ukrainian officers said was at least in part
staged across the border from Russia pushed the Ukrainian army off a 75
mile-long highway from Donetsk south to the Azov Sea.
On
Wednesday, it amounted to a no-man’s land of empty villages, roads
crisscrossed by armored vehicle treads, felled trees and grass fires
burning out of control, and panoramas of sunflower and corn rotting
unharvested in the fields.
To
the west of the Novoazovsk highway, the contrails of Ukrainian Grad
rockets rose toward the sky, and to the east, black smoke from their
impacts where Ukrainian soldiers said the newly arrived armored columns
were moving near the Russian border.
The
countryside was changing hands and the Ukrainians falling back
westward, leaving under fire along side roads. One such route was
littered with two incinerated Ukrainian army trucks, smoldering in the
early evening, and an abandoned armored vehicle.
“The
Ukrainians slipped away and the Donetsk People’s Republic hasn’t yet
arrived,” said Roman Bespaltsev, a resident of the village of
Starobeshovo south of Donetsk.
Source: The New York Times
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