Ukraine claims it has destroyed Russian military vehicles in the country's east, a day after a column was spotted moving across the border.
Ukraine's president,
Petro Poroshenko, told
David Cameron by phone that his country's armed forces had destroyed part of an armed convoy that the Guardian saw moving through a gap in a border fence on Thursday night.
There was no immediate proof, and it was impossible to establish if the Ukrainians had targeted the same convoy seen by the Guardian. The Russians categorically denied that any of their troops were even in Ukraine. But the claim marks a new escalation in the six-month confrontation over Ukraine and if verified would amount to the first confirmed military engagement between the two adversaries since the crisis began in the spring.
"The president informed [Cameron] that the information was trustworthy because the majority of those machines [Russian military vehicles] had been eliminated by the Ukrainian artillery at night," a
statement from Poroshenko's office read.
A White House spokesman said last night: "The escalation in Russian activity designed to destabilise Ukraine in recent weeks is extremely dangerous and provocative."
The Guardian and
Telegraph witnessed the convoy crossing through a gap in a wire demarcation fence on Thursday night, close to the village of Severny on the Ukrainian side. The convoy had waited by the side of the road several miles away until darkness fell, and then moved towards the border. As it crossed the fenced area armed men stood guard. It was impossible to verify the destination or ultimate fate of the convoy, or monitor how long it stayed on the other side of the border.
Nato said it had observed the Russian incursion. "What we have seen last night is the continuation of what we have seen for some time," said the Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The reports drew swift international reaction. The Russian ambassador in London was summoned to the Foreign Office, and the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said he was "very alarmed" and that any incursion could have serious consequences.
Russia strongly denied any incursion. The FSB security service said it was in fact a mobile response team of border guards operating strictly within Russia's borders. A spokesperson for the FSB Border Guard Service in Rostov region told Russia Today: "When residents report about cross-border shooting and fighting in the frontier zone, these teams are immediately deployed to such areas to provide the safety of the Russian state border and Russian citizens, and also to prevent armed people from crossing into the territory of the Russian Federation."
President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the reports "fake". Russian defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said: "No Russian military column crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border by night or by day. It would be better if the Ukrainian artillery destroyed a phantom, rather than refugees or its own soldiers."
On Friday the Guardian again travelled to the site of the crossing to look at the area in daylight. A fence which demarcates the border and runs along the outer suburbs of the Russian border town of Donetsk is permeated by informal crossings and dirt tracks. Around the area where the Guardian saw the convoy the day before, a truck with Russian military plates was parked on the Russian side. It was not possible to linger as the area is a restricted zone, but military vehicles with no plates were seen coming from the direction of Ukraine, and a car carrying three men in fatigues sped in the direction of Ukraine. Several military-style vehicles with no licence plates were visible inside the Russian town of Donetsk.
Ukraine has long accused Russia of funnelling fighters and weapons across the porous border, including the Buk missile system that is believed to have brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine last month. Russian-backed separatist rebels are continuing to fight a rearguard action against Ukrainian armed forces in and around Donetsk in Ukraine, which has come under sustained attack in recent days.
A monitoring mission of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is monitoring two official border points in the area. But the mission is not allowed to monitor other parts of the border, a limited mandate agreed after wrangling between the OSCE member states, which include Russia.
Ukraine claims it has destroyed Russian vehicles that crossed border | World news | The Guardian
