Ukraine leader urges calm as Russian forces enter country

MOSCOW — Declaring that Russian troops had crossed into the country, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko yesterday cancelled a planned visit to Turkey and convened a meeting of the National Security Council to focus on the “marked aggravation of the situation” in the south-east of his country, where pro-Russian separatists had opened a new dangerous front in the war with Kiev.

Speaking at the meeting, Mr Poroshenko called on the country to resist giving in to panic in the wake of Russian forces entering the country. “Destabilisation of the situation and panic — these are just as much weapons of the enemy as tanks,” Mr Poroshenko told the security council, said the Interfax news agency. The United Nations Security Council was due to meet later yesterday to discuss the situation after Mr Poroshenko requested a meeting.

The concerns grew after pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine seized the key south-eastern coastal town of Novoazovsk, which sits along the southern land route from Russia to Crimea, which Moscow annexed in March.

Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Moscow of making advances on the new southern front to relieve pressure on the main separatist strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk farther north, where Ukrainian forces have besieged the separatists. The loss of Novoazovsk on the Sea of Azov is a blow to Ukrainian government forces, since it leaves vulnerable the big port city of Mariupol, further west along the coast.

Colonel Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security Council, yesterday said two columns of Russian tanks and military vehicles fired Grad missiles from Russia at a border post in south-eastern Ukraine, then rolled into the country. Col Lysenko said the missiles from Russia were fired at about 11am and about an hour and a half later, two columns, including tanks and other fighting vehicles, began an attack. They entered Ukraine from Veselo-Voznesenka and Maximovo of the Rostov region in Russia.

Mr Poroshenko made his comments as the leader of the main separatist group in south-eastern Ukraine said up to 4,000 Russians, including active-duty soldiers on leave, had been fighting against Ukrainian government forces, Russian television reported.

“There are active soldiers fighting among us who preferred to spend their vacation not on the beach, but with us, among their brothers, who are fighting for their freedom,” Mr Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a rebel commander and prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said in an interview on Russian state-run television.

However, a military officer for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) told Reuters it estimated that there were more than 1,000 Russian troops operating inside Ukraine. “They are supporting separatists (and) fighting with them,” Dutch Brigadier-General Nico Tak, head of NATO’s crisis management centre, told reporters at NATO’s military headquarters near Mons, Belgium.

Russia said it had no involvement in the conflict between pro-Moscow rebels and the Ukrainian military, despite the capture of 11 Russian soldiers inside Ukraine this week. Moscow said they had probably crossed the border by accident.

The latest sharp escalation in the crisis came only two days after Mr Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin held their first talks in more than two months and agreed to work towards launching a peace process.

The confirmation that thousands of Russian soldiers have been involved in Ukraine is likely to increase tensions with the United States and the European Union, which have threatened harsher sanctions against Russia as a result of any military incursion.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk appealed to the US, the EU and Group of Seven countries to freeze Russian assets and finances until Moscow withdraws armed forces, equipment and agents.

The US Ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt tweeted: “Russian-supplied tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery and multiple rocket launchers have been insufficient to defeat Ukraine’s armed forces. So now an increasing number of Russian troops are intervening directly in fighting on Ukrainian territory.”

France and Germany also threatened Mr Putin’s government with further sanctions.

More than 2,200 people have been killed since April when the conflict escalated after the annexation. AGENCIES