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Ukrainian Defense Secretary: Ukraine now faces threat of a full-scale invasion
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Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy is warning that he has “every reason to believe” that Russian forces along Ukraine’s southern and eastern borders will invade.
“Ukraine now faces the threat of a full-scale invasion,” Parubiy said at a press conference on March 12.
He said that Ukraine would rely on military, police and a newly formed National Guard of 20,000 volunteers to protect is borders.
Parubiy estimates that more than 80,000 Russian troops have amassed along the Ukrainian border, along with as many as 270 tanks, 180 armored combat vehicles, 380 pieces of artillery, 18 rocket launchers, 140 combat aircraft, 90 military helicopters and 19 combat boats and ships.
Although the Russian government had promised to withdraw its troops conducting military drills near Ukraine’s borders, Parubiy said that the number of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border has actually increased in recent days.
On Feb. 27, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea, a peninsula that juts out from continental Ukraine into the Black Sea. Since then, the number of Russian troops in Crimea has steadily increased, giving the Kremlin full military control of the entire peninsula.
He said that Ukraine’s Interior Ministry is seeing the first traces of the Russian incursion into continental Ukraine: In the early hours of the morning on March 12, the Security Service of Ukraine apprehended several people in southern Kherson Oblast who were conducting “investigative intelligence activity.” Their leader was a citizen of the Russian Federation traveling under a stolen Ukrainian passport. After being arrested, he admitted that he traveled to Kherson to collect intelligence information, including the location of Ukrainian troops.
On March 11, the Security Service of Ukraine said investigators detained a Russian saboteur in the Donetsk region and accused him of preparing explosives and planning other acts of diversion.
Parubiy characterized the agitators as “special forces” who are members of the most “elite ranks of the Russian army.” In addition to trained military personnel, Parubiy counted professional actors among the agitators who have infiltrated Ukraine, saying that they had been hired to make the sabotage more convincing. He said that agitators have even infiltrated some of the many self-defense groups that have formed on Kyiv’s Independence Square.
[link to www.kyivpost.com]
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