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Clouding Talks, Ukraine Says It Captured Russian Troops Putin Talks to Ukrainian Leader as Videos Show Captured Russian Soldiers
(about 9 hours later)
MINSK, Belarus — Ukraine released video clips on Tuesday of what it said were captured Russian soldiers, raising tensions as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Petro O. Poroshenko. MINSK, Belarus — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia held inconclusive talks late Tuesday with the president of Ukraine, extending a reluctant hand to a new leadership vilified in Russia’s state-run news media as the fruit of a fascist putsch. Just hours earlier, Ukraine released videos of captured Russian soldiers that directly challenged Mr. Putin’s longstanding claim that his country has nothing to do with the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
In earlier peace talks between lower-ranking officials, Moscow’s position on its role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine has prevented discussion of what Ukrainian officials regard as the key to stopping the conflict: a Russian willingness to acknowledge, and halt, its support for rebels in the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk. The videos, which featured men dressed in camouflage who identified themselves as members of a Russian airborne division who had been sent into Ukraine in unmarked vehicles, put new pressure on Mr. Putin to acknowledge and halt what Ukraine and its Western supporters say is an accelerating flow of military personnel and hardware into the country’s east.
“It makes it very difficult to negotiate anything when Putin says he is not involved,” Michael A. McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Moscow and now a professor at Stanford University, said in a telephone interview. Analysis by Western officials indicates that Russia is orchestrating a multipronged offensive against Ukrainian forces. Russian forces have been trying to help separatists in eastern Ukraine break the siege of Luhansk, one of the main rebel-held cities, and open a corridor to another, Donetsk, from the Ukrainian-Russian border, Western officials say.
The release of the videos and the high-level talks came a day after Ukraine accused Russia of sending an armored column across the border, prompting Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, to express alarm on Twitter. “The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway. #escalation,” he wrote. Despite this, Mr. Putin continued to cast himself as a bystander to the conflict, saying after he met with Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, that the rebellion was an internal matter whose solution depended on the Ukrainian government’s arranging a cease-fire.
American and Ukrainian officials have said they are increasingly concerned that Russia is orchestrating a counteroffensive to reverse recent gains by Ukrainian forces. “Russia’s military incursions into Ukraine — artillery, air def systems, dozens of tanks & military personnel — represent significant escalation,” Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, wrote in a Twitter post. In his opening remarks at a meeting of a Moscow-led economic bloc in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, which was also attended by senior officials from the European Union, Mr. Putin barely mentioned the war in eastern Ukraine, presenting himself as a pragmatic leader focused on the details of trade policy and economics.
Ukraine has repeatedly accused Russia of supporting the separatists, without providing any solid evidence. On Tuesday, Kiev released video clips of four men who, under interrogation, identified themselves as Russian soldiers captured on Ukrainian territory. The men, who were among 10 soldiers Ukraine said it had captured, gave their names and military serial numbers and said they had been sent to Ukraine by their superiors after initially being told they were going on a training exercise. He eschewed the strident nationalism that has surged through Russia’s political elite since the March annexation of Crimea, seized from Ukraine after a covert Russian invasion, and instead returned to the issue that set off the current crisis: a sweeping trade and political deal that the European Union offered to Ukraine.
The videos were posted on the Facebook page of Ukraine’s so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation, just hours before Mr. Putin met Mr. Poroshenko and senior officials of the European Union in Minsk. The meeting between the two presidents, the first since a brief encounter in June, will not end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, analysts said, but could open the way for future talks. Mr. Poroshenko’s predecessor as president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, rejected the deal last November under heavy pressure from Moscow, leading to months of protests that forced him to flee to Russia in February. Encouraged by Russia, Mr. Yanukovych’s political base in eastern Ukraine — notably his hometown, Donetsk — then became the center of an armed rebellion against the new authorities in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who visited Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, over the weekend, dampened expectations for the Minsk meeting. It “certainly won’t result in the breakthrough” that Germany and others were hoping for, she told German television in an interview broadcast Sunday evening. Mr. Putin, reviving the arguments he used to dissuade Mr. Yanukovych from tilting toward Europe, warned that the trade deal, which Mr. Poroshenko signed in June, would cost Ukraine billions of dollars and allow European companies to “grab everything that is still left and oust all the others” from the Ukrainian market.
The videos released by Ukraine may make it more difficult for the Kremlin to stick to its approach of simply denying that it has any hand in the fighting. His shift from emotional exhortations about restoring Russian control over Ukrainian territory conquered in the 18th century by Catherine the Great to humdrum economic themes suggested that Mr. Putin might be recalibrating his strategy toward Ukraine in an effort to contain the damage caused by sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe.
“Everything was a lie. There were no drills here,” one of the captured Russians, who identified himself as Sergey A. Smirnov, told a Ukrainian interrogator. He said he and other Russians from an airborne unit in Kostroma, in central Russia, had been sent on what was described initially as a military training exercise but later turned into a mission into Ukraine. After having their cellphones and identity documents taken away, they were sent into Ukraine on vehicles stripped of all markings, Mr. Smirnov said. Michael A. McFaul, President Obama’s former ambassador to Moscow who is now a professor at Stanford University, said Mr. Putin had frequently shifted between more pragmatic calculations and a nostalgia-tinged commitment to reviving Russian power, particularly over former Soviet territories like Ukraine. “Putin has always had dual impulses, lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union but also recognizing that Russia has to integrate in the wider world,” Mr. McFaul said in a telephone interview.
In another video released by Ukraine, a man identified himself as Ivan Milchakov, a member of a Russian paratroop regiment from Kostroma, north of Moscow. “Everything is different here, not like they show it on television. We’ve come as cannon fodder,” he said, apparently referring to Russian television reports that the ouster of Viktor F. Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president in February had left Ukraine in the hands of fascist fanatics. He said he “did not see where we crossed the border” into Ukraine and had been told he was being sent on “a 70-kilometer march over three days.” Russia has already cut off gas supplies to Ukraine, complaining that it has not been paid for previous deliveries, and energy shortages will grow increasingly painful for Ukraine with the approach of winter. Moscow’s long-term goal, analysts say, is not to force Ukraine to recognize the rebels’ self-declared states, which even Russia does not recognize, but to ensure that Ukraine never joins NATO or allows Western troops on its territory.
RIA Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, quoted an unnamed source from the Russian Defense Ministry as saying the men had crossed into Ukraine by accident. “The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained,” the source said. But Western officials said that instead of pulling back from its military involvement, Russia had stepped up its activities to help pro-Russian rebels mount counterattacks and break the momentum of a Ukrainian offensive in the east.
A spokesman for the Ukrainian military, Andriy Lysenko, disputed that account and accused Russia of sending the soldiers across the border on a “special mission,” Reuters reported. Ukraine greeted Tuesday’s meeting in Minsk, held in a marble-clad hall dripping with chandeliers, as a singular opportunity to end, or at least curtail, a conflict that has killed more than 2,000 people in eastern Ukraine, as well as nearly 300 people aboard a Malaysia Airlines jet shot down over rebel-held territory in July.
Dmitri Trenin, an expert on Russian foreign policy and the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, predicted that Russia would persist with its denials but might be willing to quietly abandon its support over time as it shifted to other ways to pressure Kiev. “There is no solution to the Ukraine issue any time soon,” Mr. Trenin said in a telephone interview from Moscow. “Today in Minsk, without any question, the fate of the world and the fate of Europe are being decided,” Mr. Poroshenko said in an opening speech to the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the three members of the Eurasian Customs Union, and officials from the European Union.
Russia has already severed gas supplies to Ukraine, complaining that it has not been paid for previous deliveries, and energy shortages will grow increasingly painful for Ukraine as winter approaches. Moscow’s long-term goal, Mr. Trenin said, is not to force Ukraine to recognize the rebels’ self-declared states but to ensure that Ukraine never joins NATO or allows Western troops on Ukrainian territory. But after group discussions ended and Mr. Poroshenko and Mr. Putin retreated for a late-night, one-on-one meeting, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus acknowledged that there had been no breakthrough, describing the talks as “very complicated” but nonetheless an important first step toward peace in Ukraine. He said lower-ranking officials would soon resume negotiations, possibly as early as Wednesday.
That goal could be accomplished, he said, by forcing Ukraine to make constitutional changes that would give eastern regions an effective veto over key decisions by the government in Kiev. “The positions of parties differed drastically, but we all agreed we must have a compromise,” Mr. Lukashenko told reporters. “Everyone agreed a de-escalation is needed.”
“We are still at the early stages of this monumental struggle,” he said. “The eastern rebels may lose their battle and Putin may be willing to accept this as a tactical move. But he is not ready to accept defeat of Russia’s policy in Ukraine.” Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, said that there had been no “direct discussion” of the video footage of captured Russian troops released early Tuesday, but that officials had talked about the need to secure the Russian-Ukrainian border, possibly with help from monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Any discussion of a cease-fire needs to ensure that Ukraine’s borders are secure,” she told reporters in Minsk.
The gathering in Minsk was originally scheduled as a meeting of the Eurasian Customs Union, a Russian-led economic bloc that includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. But the crisis in Ukraine took over as the main issue when President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, the host of the meeting, arranged for Mr. Poroshenko to attend and hold talks with Mr. Putin, their first meeting since a frosty encounter during D-Day commemorations in France in early June. In earlier peace talks between lower-ranking Ukrainian and Russian officials, Moscow’s position on its role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine has prevented discussion of what Ukrainian officials regard as the key to stopping the conflict: a willingness from Russia to acknowledge and halt its support for the rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Mr. Lukashenko told Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, who was also in Minsk, that “we must extinguish the flames of this conflict by all means possible.” But he made it clear that the Minsk session was just a start and would not produce a swift settlement. He said it would merely establish a “platform for negotiations.” The release of the videos and the high-level talks came a day after Ukraine accused Russia of sending an armored column across the border toward the coastal city of Mariupol. That, along with other Russian moves, prompted Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, to express alarm on Twitter. “The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway. #escalation,” he wrote.
With Mr. Putin arriving late in the Belarussian capital, the start of the meeting was pushed back an hour to 3 p.m., leaving only a few hours for discussion on the crisis in Ukraine as well as talks about the customs union. Mr. Putin’s original hopes to turn the alliance into an eastern rival to the European Union have faded since Ukraine refused to join. Western officials said the purpose of the push toward Mariupol, which is far from the main conflict zone, was to open a new front that would divert Ukrainian forces from Donetsk and Luhansk, and possibly to seize an outlet to the sea in the event that Russia tries to establish a permanent separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Poroshenko has instead chosen to sign a sweeping trade and political pact with the European Union, reversing a decision last November by his predecessor, Mr. Yanukovych, to turn toward Russia instead of Europe. Mr. Putin’s economic bloc, said Mr. McFaul, the former ambassador, will “limp along — but without Ukraine it is a very different organization” from what Mr. Putin had wanted. Two other Russian incursions, the officials said, were aimed at breaking the siege of Luhansk by Ukrainian forces and opening a supply corridor to Donetsk.
To support the counteroffensive, Russia has deployed a sizable amount of artillery within range of Ukrainian forces near Luhansk. The Ukrainian forces were out of range of artillery based on Russian territory, so Moscow moved the units into Ukraine.
“Russian military units with self-propelled artillery have entered eastern Ukraine and have established an operational presence in the Krasnodon area, an area controlled by Russian separatists,” a senior Obama administration official said.
The videos released by Ukraine could make it more difficult for the Kremlin to stick to its approach of denying that it has any hand in the fighting, though a state-run Russian news agency cited an unnamed Defense Ministry official as saying the soldiers had crossed into Ukraine by accident.