Alarm at Russian troop build-up at Ukraine border

Moscow’s military build-up on its border with Ukraine has alarmed the US and Europe, with troop deployment ­described as bigger than in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.

Russian servicemen rehearse for the Victory Day military parade in St Petersburg. Russia will celebrate the 76th anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany on May 9. Picture: AFP

Moscow’s military build-up on its border with Ukraine has alarmed the US and Europe, with troop deployment ­described as bigger than in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.

Ukraine fears the Kremlin is looking for a pretext to attack, and is pushing the West for more practical support as it looks to deter further aggression from Moscow.

Tensions have spiralled as more Russian troops have been moved around its southwestern neighbour, and as clashes with Moscow-backed separatists intensify, fuelling fears of a return to widespread fighting in Ukraine.

Washington announced on Tuesday that its envoy to Moscow had been recalled to the US for consultations after Russia “recommended” ambassador John Sullivan temporarily leave amid the soaring tensions.

Nerves are also being stretched with the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic and Poland in the past few days, amid growing calls from several ­European nations for more action following US sanctions on Moscow for alleged election interference and a cyber attacks last year.

A Pentagon spokesman ­des­cribed the deployment as “very ­seriously concerning”.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell cited a figure of 150,000 Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border, before his services scaled that figure back to 100,000.

“It is the largest build-up we’ve seen certainly since 2014, which resulted in the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity,” US Defence Department spokesman John Kirby said.

“We don’t believe that this build-up is conducive to security and stability along the border with Ukraine, and certainly not in ­occupied Crimea.

“We certainly heard the Russians proclaim that this is all about training. It’s not completely clear to us that that’s exactly the purpose.”

Moscow has said it was “not threatening anyone” while also denouncing what it called Ukrainian “provocations”.

Moscow’s military says it is conducting exercises along its frontier in response to moves by Western military alliance NATO that “threaten Russia”.

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said last week that “two armies and three airborne units were successfully deployed” to Russia’s western border and the drills would be over “within two weeks”.

Kiev Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pressed the EU to prepare “a new set of sectoral sanctions” against Russia in talks with his counterparts from the 27-nation bloc on Monday.

A Ukrainian soldier was killed and another wounded on Sunday in clashes with separatists in the east of the country, where such confrontations have increased.

The Kremlin is widely regarded as the military and political godfather of pro-Russian separatists in the eastern region of Donbass, where more than 13,000 people have been killed and nearly 1.5 million people have been displaced since fighting started seven years ago in the wake of Moscow’s ­annexation of Crimea.

Earlier, the Czech government said it would eliminate Russia’s Rosatom from a multi-billion-euro tender to build a nuclear plant unit and would no longer consider buying Sputnik V vaccines.

The announcements follow tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats after Prague accused Russia’s ­secret services of being behind a fatal explosion on Czech territory in 2014. Eighteen Russian diplomats identified by Czech intelligence as spies left Prague for Moscow on Monday, while 20 Czech diplomats expelled by Russia in retaliation landed in Prague later in the day.

Citing an intelligence report, the Czech government has said Russia’s military secret service GRU ­orchestrated a 2014 explosion that killed two people, followed by ­another one the same year.

Czech police are seeking two men in connection with the blast, who British authorities also identified as suspects in the 2018 poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.

The Kremlin has dubbed the expulsion of its diplomats “provocative and unfriendly”.

The two Russians allegedly behind the explosion were identified as Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin based on video footage from the site and photos published after the Skripal attack.

AFP