What is happening on the Ukraine/Russia border? Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, US officials say, including moving troops to Belarus for military exercises. This has included sending more equipment to separatists in eastern Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian defense intelligence. It said Russia had this month sent “7,000 tons of fuel, several tanks and self-propelled artillery systems, other weapons and ammunition, including artillery systems and mortars” to the separatist regions. “It is a fundamentally different operation than anything we've seen before,” said Samuel rap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and former US State Department official. “The Belarus case is illustrative. There has never been a quote-unquote snap exercise in Belarus before. You've never seen this kind of deployment for a non-scheduled exercise.” Valery sim, head of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, was quoted as saying that NATO was paying too much attention to Russia’s domestic movement of troops. The redeployment of units during combat training is a routine practice for the armed forces of any state, he said. Gear sim added that reports Russia is planning to invade Ukraine is a "lie". Meanwhile, Western warnings have recently increased in intensity, with US officials stating in mid-January that Putin could invade Ukraine “at any point”. They had said following negotiations that a Russian effort was underway to create a pretext for its troops to invade Ukraine. The warnings came the same day that Ukrainian government websites were subject to a cyberattack that Ukrainian authorities blamed on Russia. The UK foreign office warned on 22 January that the Russian government was looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv, has characterized these reports as “flashing red warning signs” that Russian plans “extend beyond just, you know, flexing military muscle”. Russia has denied Western allegations, calling them "disinformation" while emphasizing that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) poses a threat. Putin said in December that Russia was not putting missiles near US borders, but that the US had its missiles on Russia's "doorstep". At the end of 2013, Ukraine's Moscow-friendly leader Viktor Yanukovych cancelled plans to sign an agreement that would bring the country closer to the EU after Putin proposed a customs union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan instead. Yanukovych's move prompted protests and civil unrest in Kyiv, eventually resulting in his ousting. Shortly after, Russia annexed Crimea in a move that was denounced as illegal by a UN General Assembly resolution. The largely Russian-speaking peninsula had been transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The Kremlin said they acted on a Crimea referendum in favor of rejoining Russia, but Western countries, including the EU, said the referendum, which occurred after troops invaded, was "illegal and illegitimate". Conflict later broke out between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists who declared two regions in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, known as the Donbass, self-proclaimed republics. While Russia and Ukraine signed agreements in Minsk in 2014 and 2015 aimed at bringing forth a ceasefire, the conflict has now killed more than 14,000 people. Since that agreement, there have been repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement, with the conflict transforming into a trench war. There was hope of progress in 2019 as Russia and Ukraine swapped prisoners and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Euronews in 2020 that he thought there was a “high chance of ending the war” but clashes have continued. In the spring of 2021, Russia began building up tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine in response to what it described as threats from NATO, a move that was widely condemned internationally. It later said that it withdrew those troops.
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