.
NOVOAZOVSK, Ukraine Tanks,
artillery and infantry have
crossed from Russia into an
unbreached part of eastern
Ukraine in recent days, attacking
Ukrainian forces and causing
panic and wholesale retreat not
only in this small border town
but a wide swath of territory, in
what Ukrainian and Western
military officials described on
Wednesday as a stealth invasion.
The attacks outside this city and
in an area to the north essentially
have opened a new, third front
in the war in eastern Ukraine
between government forces and
pro-Russian separatists, along
with the fighting outside the
cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Exhausted, filthy and dismayed,
Ukrainian soldiers staggering out
of Novoazovsk for safer territory
said Tuesday they were cannon
fodder for the forces coming
from Russia. As they spoke, tank
shells whistled in from the east
and exploded nearby.
Some of the retreating Ukrainian
soldiers appeared unwilling to
fight. The commander of their
unit, part of the 9th Brigade from
Vinnytsia, in western Ukraine,
barked at the men to turn
around, to no effect. All right,
the commander said. Anybody
who refuses to fight, sit apart
from the others. Eleven men did,
while the others returned to the
city.
Some troops were in a full,
chaotic retreat: a city-busload of
them careened past on the
highway headed west, purple
curtains flapping through
windows shot out by gunfire. A
Ukrainian military spokesman
said Wednesday the army still
controlled Novoazvosk but that
13 soldiers had died in the
fighting.
The behavior of the Ukrainian
forces corroborated assertions
by Western and Ukrainian
officials that Russia, despite its
strenuous denials, is
orchestrating a new
counteroffensive to help the
besieged separatists of the
Donetsk Peoples Republic, who
have been reeling from
aggressive Ukrainian military
advances in recent weeks.
Russia is clearly trying to put its
finger on the scale to tip things
back in favor of its proxies, said
a senior American official.
Artillery barrages and other
Russian military actions have
taken their toll on the Ukrainian
military.
The Obama administration,
which has placed increasingly
punitive economic sanctions on
Russia because of the Ukraine
crisis, asserted over the past few
days that the Russians had sent
new columns of tanks and armor
across the border.
These incursions indicate a
Russian-directed
counteroffensive is likely
underway, Jen Psaki, the State
Department spokeswoman, said
Wednesday.
Russian forces have been trying
to help the separatists break the
siege of Luhansk and have been
fighting to open a corridor to
Donetsk from the Ukrainian-
Russian border, Western officials
say.
To the south, Russia has been
backing a separatist push
toward the southern town of
Mariupol, a major port on the Sea
of Azov, according to Western
and Ukrainian officials. The
Russian aim, one Western official
said, is to open a new front that
would divert Ukrainian forces
from Donetsk and Luhansk and
to possibly seize an outlet to the
sea in the event that Russia tries
to establish a separatist enclave
in eastern Ukraine.
Some Western officials fear the
move might even be a step in
what they suspect is a broader
Russian strategy to carve out a
land link to Crimea, the strategic
Ukrainian peninsula that Russia
annexed in March, setting off
Moscows worst crisis with the
West since the Cold War.
The Russian militarys use of
artillery from locations within
Ukraine is of special concern to
Western military officials, who
say Russian artillery has already
been used to shell Ukrainian
forces near Luhansk. And along
with the antiaircraft systems
operated by separatists or
Russian forces inside Ukraine,
the artillery has the potential to
alter the balance of power in the
struggle for control of eastern
Ukraine.
Russia has denied that it has
intervened militarily in Ukraine
and the separatists have asserted
that they are using captured
Ukrainian equipment. But
American officials say they are
confident that the artillery in
Ukraines Krasnodon area is
Russias since Ukrainian forces
have not penetrated that deeply
into that separatist-controlled
region. American officials also
say the separatists have no
experience in using such
weaponry.
We judge that self-propelled
artillery is operated by Russians
rather than separatists since no
separatist training on this
artillery has occurred to date, an
Obama administration official
said.
The United States has
photographs that show the
Russian artillery moved into
Ukraine, American officials say.
One photo dated Aug. 21, shown
to a reporter from The New York
Times, shows Russian military
units moving self-propelled
artillery into Ukraine. Another
photo, dated Aug. 23, shows the
artillery in firing positions in
Ukraine.
Advanced air defenses, including
systems not known to be in the
Ukrainian arsenal, have also been
used to blunt the Ukrainian
militarys air power, American
officials say. In addition, they
said, the Russian military
routinely flies drones over
Ukraine and shares the
intelligence with the separatists.
The Ukrainian retreat from the
border area near Novoazovsk,
which began on Tuesday, came
as President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia, at a summit with his
Ukrainian counterpart in Minsk,
Belarus, continued to assert that
Russia was a bystander. Mr. Putin
called the Ukrainian insurgency
an internal matter and said that
the Ukrainian government
needed to negotiate a cease-fire.
By coupling the Russian military
actions with his political talks in
Minsk, Mr. Putin appeared to be
calculating that Moscow could
intervene in eastern Ukraine with
conventional Russian forces
without risking further Western
economic sanctions.
On the highway here, Sgt. Ihor
Sharapov, a soldier with the
Ukrainian border patrol unit, said
he had seen tanks drive across
the border but marked with flags
of the separatist movement here,
the Donetsk Peoples Republic.
The group that attacked the city
crossed from Russia, and though
some soldiers were convinced
they had spent two days fighting
the Russians, others said they
had no way of knowing who
was inside the tanks, or the
identities of the infantry who
crossed the border and
advanced toward this town.
I tell you they are Russians, but
this is what proof I have, said
Sgt. Aleksei Panko, holding up his
thumb and index finger to form
a zero. Sergeant Panko estimated
that about 60 armored vehicles
crossed near Novoazovsk. This
is what happened: they crossed
the border, took up positions
and started shooting.
The Ukrainian Vinnytsia brigade
met the cross-border advance
over the six miles of countryside
separating Novoazovsk from the
Russian border, but later
retreated to the western edge of
town along the Rostov-Mariupol
highway, where soldiers were
collapsed in exhaustion on the
roadside. This is now a war
with Russia, Sergeant Panko
said.
The counteroffensive that
Ukrainian officers said was at
least in part staged across the
border from Russia pushed the
Ukrainian army off a 75 mile-long
highway from Donetsk south to
the Azov Sea.
On Wednesday, it amounted to a
no-mans land of empty villages,
roads crisscrossed by armored
vehicle treads, felled trees and
grass fires burning out of
control, and panoramas of
sunflower and corn rotting
unharvested in the fields.
To the west of the Novoazovsk
highway, the contrails of
Ukrainian Grad rockets rose
toward the sky, and to the east,
black smoke from their impacts
where Ukrainian soldiers said
the newly arrived armored
columns were moving near the
Russian border.
The countryside was changing
hands and the Ukrainians falling
back westward, leaving under
fire along side roads. One such
route was littered with two
incinerated Ukrainian army
trucks, smoldering in the early
evening, and an abandoned
armored vehicle.
The Ukrainians slipped away
and the Donetsk Peoples
Republic hasnt yet arrived, said
Roman Bespaltsev, a resident of
the village of Starobeshovo south
of Donetsk.
Andrew E. Kramer reported from
Novoazovsk, Ukraine, and Michael
R. Gordon from Washington. Eric
Schmitt contributed reporting
from Washington
