Russia slipped 1,000 troops into Ukraine, says NATO

MOSCOW — Separatists in eastern Ukraine were yesterday battling government forces on two fronts near the Sea of Azov and south of Donetsk as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reported a surge of Russian troops and advanced equipment into the war zone.

The United States and the European Union (EU) are threatening Russian President Vladimir Putin with further sanctions, even as the EU began talks in Moscow yesterday aimed at a temporary deal with Ukraine to allow natural-gas flows to resume.

US President Barack Obama said Russia faces more costs and consequences because it has deliberately and repeatedly violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, although he explicitly ruled out the prospect of US military intervention.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the unrest.

Several EU foreign ministers yesterday accused Russia of invading eastern Ukraine and said Moscow should be punished with more sanctions.

The meeting of the 28-nation bloc’s top diplomats in Milan came a day after NATO said Moscow has slipped at least 1,000 Russian soldiers and much heavy weaponry into Ukraine, citing satellite photos.

“We have to be aware of what we are facing. We are now in the midst of the second Russian invasion of Ukraine within a year,” said Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, referring to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in April.

NATO’s secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen yesterday accused Russia of blatantly and illegally intervening in eastern Ukraine.

“Despite Moscow’s hollow denials, it is now clear that Russian troops and equipment have illegally crossed the border into eastern and south-eastern Ukraine,” Mr Rasmussen told reporters in Brussels.

“Russian forces are engaged in direct military operations inside Ukraine,” he added.

Mr Rasmussen yesterday also reaffirmed a 2008 Bucharest summit pledge that Ukraine will become a member of NATO if it so wishes and provided it fulfils the necessary criteria. His comments came as Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk called for the Parliament in Kiev to debate possible NATO membership for the country.

But while the United States, the leadership of the NATO military alliance, and more hawkish European countries, such as Britain and Poland, say unequivocally that Russian troops are fighting in Ukraine, some European leaders have been more cautious.

Despite being on the opposite side of the crisis, Germany and France, for example, share Mr Putin’s desire not to paint it as an out-and-out war between Russia and Ukraine so as to prevent imposing more costly sanctions that could block the path to a truce with Russia, which they hope will resolve the crisis.

In Moscow yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the satellite photos of Russian troop movements as fakes.

“There was news that space imagery shows movements of Russian troops and the images turned out to be from computer games,” Mr Lavrov told reporters.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers were battling Russian-backed forces near Donetsk, Luhansk, Alchevsk and other towns in the area, military spokesman Leonid Matyukhin said.

Government forces took over the town of Komsomolsk in Donetsk region and troops moved into Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, to reinforce the city, the National Guard said in a statement on its website. Agencies