Ukraine Says Russian Forces Lead Major New Offensive in East
By ANDREW E. KRAMER and MICHAEL R. GORDONAUG. 27, 2014
Photo
Ukrainian soldiers regrouped in a defensive position after coming under heavy shelling in Novoazovsk, a border town near Russia in southeastern Ukraine. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
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 are calling 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 that the forces coming from Russia had treated them like cannon fodder. As they spoke, tank shells whistled in from the east and exploded nearby. ...
ome 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.
Their behavior 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 People’s Republic, who have been reeling from aggressive Ukrainian military advances in recent weeks.
The Obama administration, which has placed increasingly punitive economic sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine crisis, on Tuesday asserted that the Russians had sent new columns of tanks and armor across the border. The American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, said a “Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway.”
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 Azov Sea, 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 Lukhansk 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 Moscow’s worst crisis with the West since the Cold War....
