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.
Parubiy announced that Ukraine’s Border
Service prevented 3,700 Russian citizens from entering the country under
suspicion that they were sent to carry out “extremist activity.”
He noted that provocations are most likely
to occur in the Kherson, Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, saying that Kherson
and Odessa are subject to subversive activity because of their proximity to the
Russian-backed breakaway state of Transnistria. Luhansk and Donetsk share long
stretches of border with Russia.
Parubiy announced that the National
Security and Defense Council on March 13 will submit a law to parliament
establishing a Ukrainian National Guard in response to security threats in the
south and east. The National Guard will protect Ukraine’s borders, work to
ensure domestic security, and prevent terrorist activity, broadening “the
functions…of the current Ministry of the Interior troops.”
Parubiy said that the National Guard will
enroll 20,000 volunteers from around the country, who will begin training on March
13. Many of these will be conscripted
from the self-defense forces that defended Independence Square from riot police
officers for months: “We call upon all the groups that were on the Maidan” to
defend Ukraine.
On March 13, the National Security and Defense
Council will also submit a bill to the Verkhovna Rada calling for the armed
forces to be mobilized.
Parubiy’s announcement comes after acting
President Oleksandr Turchynov expressed concern about the current state of the
Ukrainian military on March 11, saying that it had only about 6,000
combat-ready infantry.
Although many believe that Ukraine would be
powerless to stop a Russian attack on its eastern border, Parubiy said that
Ukrainian “units are now placed in such a way that we can repel an attack from
any direction.”
Parubiy also used the press conference to
remind the United States and the United Kingdom of their obligations as
guarantors of Ukraine’s security, according to the terms of the 1994 Budapest
Memorandum under which Ukraine forfeited its nuclear arsenal in return for security
assurances. The West has been reluctant to intervene militarily to stop
aggression and few believe that Europe and the U.S. will risk war with Russia
to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Kyiv Post staff writer Isaac
Webb can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @isaacdwebb
