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Ukraine Says It Destroyed Military Vehicles Crossing Border From Russia Russian Armed Vehicles Destroyed After Crossing Border, Ukraine Says
(about 5 hours later)
KAMENSK-SHAKHTINSKY, Russia — NATO and Ukraine said that a column of military vehicles crossed into Ukraine from Russia Thursday night, and Ukraine later said that most of them had been destroyed by artillery fire. It was not clear whether Russian soldiers or rebel separatists were driving the vehicles. KIEV, Ukraine — The government of Ukraine, pushing to oust pro-Russian rebels from their last enclaves in the east while nervously eyeing a stalled Russian aid convoy, said on Friday that its force had destroyed a number of Russian military vehicles that it said crossed into Ukraine late Thursday through a border area controlled by the separatists.
President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine said in a statement on his website that he could confirm some Western news reports that the column had crossed into Ukraine last night. Russia denied sending a military column into Ukraine, but the incursion, first reported by British journalists who said they saw 23 armored vehicles crossing the frontier, was confirmed Friday by NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
“The president informed that the given information was trustworthy and confirmed because the majority of the machines had been eliminated by Ukrainian artillery at night,” the statement said. “I can confirm that last night we saw a Russian incursion, crossing of the Ukrainian border,” Mr. Rasmussen told journalists during a visit to Copenhagen, according to news agency reports. He did not elaborate on what had happened to the Russian vehicles.
In Copenhagen, the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said that the alliance had detected an “incursion” of vehicles from Russia last night, adding: “What we have seen last night is the continuation of what we have seen for some time.” But a statement on the website of Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, said that most of the Russian vehicles had been destroyed. The statement said Mr. Poroshenko had spoken by telephone with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain about news media reports of a Russian military incursion and told him that “the given information was trustworthy and confirmed because the majority of the machines had been eliminated by Ukrainian artillery at night.” It gave no details.
Financial markets in Europe and the United States swooned on news of the incursion, while oil prices jumped. Ukraine has repeatedly accused Moscow of sending weapons and military hardware to support rebels in eastern Ukraine, including the surface-to-air missile system that Ukraine and its Western supporters believe shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over rebel-held territory last month.
Meanwhile, the convoy of more than 260 trucks that Russia says are filled with food and other aid for civilians caught up in the fighting in eastern Ukraine remained stalled inside Russia on Friday amid confusion over when inspections would start. Ukraine and its Western allies want to ensure that the cargo contains only relief supplies and not items that could help pro-Russian fighters battling to survive a Ukrainian offensive. But the latest reports of Russian armor crossing the border stirred particular alarm amid heightened suspicions over Russia’s intentions after its announcement this week that it was sending a huge convoy of trucks to Ukraine to deliver aid to civilians caught in the conflict zone.
A statement early Friday by the Ukrainian military said border guards had started examining the trucks, but the military’s spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, later denied this and said inspections could not begin until the Ukrainian authorities received documents detailing the trucks’ contents. Ukraine has voiced concerns that the aid convoy, now parked in a field inside Russia, could be a cover for a stealthy military intervention like the one in which Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in March through the covert deployment of heavily armed masked men.
Mr. Lysenko said Ukraine had sent border guards and customs officials to a Russian border town to examine the trucks but was still waiting for the necessary documentation from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross, for its part, said Russia had yet to provide a detailed inventory and called for a speedy resolution of the problem. Ukraine’s military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, told a briefing in Kiev that a large portion of the armored column that passed into Ukraine late Thursday “no longer existed” after a strike by Ukrainian forces. He said Ukraine could not stop Russia sending military material through a rebel-controlled border zone and had adopted a strategy of “allowing the columns deeper into Ukrainian territory where they can be destroyed.”
In the interim, Red Cross staff members, representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and more than 50 Ukrainian border guards already on site had nothing to do. Mr. Lysenko did not say, however, whether the vehicles were still under Russian control at the time of their destruction, or whether they had already been transferred to the rebels.
In a statement issued in Geneva, the Red Cross said swift action was need to allow “confirmation of the strictly humanitarian nature of the cargo.” The new spike in tensions between Moscow and Kiev came as European Union foreign ministers held an emergency meeting in Brussels on Iraq and Ukraine. Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told reporters there that he had spoken to his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, early Friday as diplomats scrambled to establish whether the Russians had moved across the Ukrainian border in some significant fashion linked to the aid convoy rather than “the unfortunately all too frequent movement across the border” that he said can be observed many nights.
“As and when agreement is reached, we plan to deliver this humanitarian aid to people affected by conflict in eastern Ukraine, health facilities and other welfare organizations,” Laurent Corbaz, the Red Cross’s head of operations for Europe and Central Asia, said during a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. “People are struggling to cope with limited access to basic services such as water and electricity, so speed is of the essence.” European foreign ministers did not announce or threaten any new round of sanctions against Russia, but they issued a tough warning to the Kremlin against trying to use humanitarian aid as a pretext for military action.
At the camp where the trucks were parked overnight, Russian officials and a contingent of young men dressed identically in beige hats, T-shirts and shorts allowed journalists to inspect trucks of their choice for a second straight day. None could say definitively when they would leave. “Any unilateral military actions on the part of the Russian Federation in Ukraine under any pretext, including humanitarian, will be considered by the European Union as a blatant violation of international law,” a statement issued at the end of the Brussels meeting said. “In order to achieve rapid and tangible results in de-escalation and to improve the situation of the civilian population, the European Union urges the Russian Federation to put an immediate stop to any form of border hostilities, in particular to the flow of arms, military advisers and armed personnel into the conflict region, and to withdraw its forces from the border.”
“A day, two days, two weeks, a month,” said Boris Pashenko, a border service representative. Russian news agencies quoted an unidentified spokesman for the Border Guard Service as denying that any Russian vehicles had crossed the border into Ukraine. Such reports, he said, are “completely untrue.”
The trucks were in a border zone close to several military bases, where columns of armored military vehicles driving in the direction of the Ukrainian border are a common sight. Two Western journalists reported seeing 23 armored vehicles crossing a border post into Ukraine on Thursday evening. He said that the Russian border service, run by the domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B., had simply deployed more mobile teams near the border to counter what he said was increased infiltration by Ukrainian forces into Russia and more frequent shelling across the border.
Ukraine and the United States have accused Russia of covertly arming pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. A reporter for The Guardian said he and a colleague had seen 23 Russian armored personnel carriers, supported by fuel trucks and other vehicles, crossing into Ukraine on Thursday evening through a hole in a barbed-wire fence that used to mark the frontier.
Russian news agencies quoted an unidentified spokesman for the border guard service as saying that the service, run by the F.S.B. — the successor agency to the K.G.B. — had deployed more mobile teams near the border. The spokesman said this was a response to increased infiltration by Ukrainian servicemen into Russia and more frequent shelling across the border. He denied that any vehicles had crossed the border, calling such reports “completely untrue.” In a sign of the suspicions dividing Moscow and Kiev, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine of both stalling the Russian aid convoy and plotting military means to thwart it. The convoy has been idling since Thursday near a Russian military base outside the Russian town of Kamensk-Shakhtinsky because of a dispute over paperwork.
Sergey Karavaytsev of Russia’s Ministry for Emergency Situations denied that the trucks in the convoy were from the military and said they were hired through private businesses. Masked guards who said they were military police officers also appeared at the camp site late Thursday evening. Members of the Red Cross were also at the convoy’s field camp on Friday, Mr. Karavaytsev said. Ukraine has sent more than 50 border guards and customs officials to Russia to inspect the convoy’s cargo, but said they have not been able to start examining the trucks because they have not received necessary documentation from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross, for its part, said Russia had yet to provide a detailed inventory and the organization called for a speedy resolution of the problem.
In Kiev, Mr. Lysenko said that an agreement had been reached to allow the inspection of the convoy, and the searches would start once the dispute over paperwork was resolved. "Help is needed and we accepted it,” he said, adding that Ukrainian inspectors had already traveled to Donetsk, a small Russian town that has the same name as a separatist stronghold in eastern Ukraine, to begin their work. “But we can’t start the procedure because we don’t have documents.” The Russian Foreign Ministry statement accused Ukraine of trying to wreck Russia’s humanitarian efforts, but it did not address the question of whether Moscow had provided a detailed inventory of the trucks’ contents as requested by the Red Cross. The exact nature of the convoy’s cargo has bedeviled Russia’s relief effort from the start because of Ukrainian fears that it could include military aid for pro-Russian separatist rebels.
While backing away from the angry denunciations that characterized Ukraine’s initial response to Moscow’s relief effort, Mr. Lysenko repeated earlier Ukrainian accusations that Russia was sending military assistance across the border to pro-Russian rebels. He said unspecified military equipment had been moved into Ukraine from Russia through a border area controlled by the pro-Russian separatists. The statement said intensified Ukrainian government military activity in southeast Ukraine was “obviously” aimed at cutting the planned route of the convoy to Luhansk, and it spoke of a possible attack on the convoy itself. Ukrainian forces on Thursday seized a village that straddles the main road from Russia to Luhansk, a rebel-held Ukrainian city that is the planned destination of the Russian relief supplies.
Stung by accusations that it is stalling the delivery of Russian relief supplies to the eastern city of Luhansk and is not doing enough to improve the plight of residents caught up in the fighting, Ukraine is sending its own aid convoys to the besieged city. Mr. Lysenko said 71 Ukrainian trucks had been sent to the conflict zone with food, water, tea, soap and other supplies. He said 390 tons of Ukrainian aid had already arrived in Luhansk. Roughly 20 minutes after that statement, the Russian ministry issued another one, saying the two sides were working to resolve their differences.
He denied rebel claims that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the shelling on Thursday of downtown Donetsk. Mr. Lysenko blamed rebels for the shelling, accusing them of firing into the city from positions near the Donetsk train station, but did not explain why the rebels would fire into a city they control. Pavlo Klimkin, the Ukrainian foreign minister, telephoned his Russian counterpart, Mr. Lavrov, and the two agreed on the need for “more urgent” participation of international organizations in completing the humanitarian mission, the brief, second Russian statement said.
Russia announced that Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister, had spoken by telephone with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, about speeding the passage of the convoy. Aside from the urgent need to get the supplies across the border, the two men also agreed to work toward establishing a cease-fire while the aid is delivered, the Foreign Ministry statement said. By late Friday, it was still not clear when the aid convoy might be cleared for the final leg of its mission.
In a statement issued in Geneva, the Red Cross said swift action was needed to allow “confirmation of the strictly humanitarian nature of the cargo” before the trucks could proceed.
“As and when agreement is reached, we plan to deliver this humanitarian aid to people affected by conflict in eastern Ukraine, health facilities and other welfare organizations,” Laurent Corbaz, the Red Cross’s head of operations for Europe and Central Asia, said during a visit to Kiev. “People are struggling to cope with limited access to basic services such as water and electricity, so speed is of the essence.”
The Ukrainian government, stung by accusations that it is stalling the delivery of Russian relief supplies to the eastern city of Luhansk and is not doing enough to improve the plight of residents caught up in the fighting, is sending its own aid convoys to the besieged city. Mr. Lysenko said 71 Ukrainian trucks had been sent to the conflict zone with food, water, tea, soap and other supplies. He said 390 tons of Ukrainian aid had already arrived in Luhansk.