“Regarding the reinforcement of our western borders due to the actions taken by the NATO countries […]this needs to be studied, I ask you to prepare a report for me,” Putin told his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, during a televised meeting of his Security Council.
NATO countries have deployed thousands of troops in Central and Eastern Europe in reaction to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, while Russia demands just the opposite: a withdrawal from the Alliance.
Within the NATO member countries, Poland and three Baltic states share common borders with Russia. Ukraine, for its part, borders other Member States: Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
One of the Russian justifications for the offensive in Ukraine is the fear that this country will join the Atlantic Alliance, whose successive extensions have been perceived in Moscow as an existential threat.
War in Ukraine: clashes continue
More than 3,200 military targets were destroyed during the military invasion that Russia launched on February 24 in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry announced today.
The entity’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, specified in a press conference that “during the operation (which today enters its sixteenth day), 3,213 Ukrainian military infrastructure targets have been disabled, including 98 aircraft, 118 unmanned aerial devices, 1,041 combat and armored vehicles, 113 multiple rocket launchers, 389 artillery and mortar systems, and 843 military vehicles.
The latest official report, released yesterday, had confirmed that the total number of targets destroyed reached 2,911, the Russian news agency Sputnik recalled.
Over the past 24 hours, according to Konashenkov, Russian fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems shot down three Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopters and eight drones, including five Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2s.
A total of 107 targets were hit from the air, including six command posts and communications centers, 14 ammunition, fuel and lubricant depots and 11 war material agglomerations.
Two attacks launched this morning with long-range, high-precision weapons, according to Konashenkov, took out of service the Lutsk military airfield in northwestern Ukraine and the Ivano-Frankovsk airfield in the south-west.
The Defense spokesman also reported that its own troops operating in the separatist region of Donetsk, with a Ukrainian but Russian-speaking population that Moscow recognizes as independent and with the name of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), advanced six kilometers in the last day and they took several localities, among them Volnovaja.
A spokesman for the separatist militia has admitted in recent hours that up to 40 percent of Donetsk territory remains under the control of Ukrainian forces.
“Between 35 and 40 percent,” said spokesman Eduard Basurin, in an interview with the Rossiya 24 channel.
When rebelling in 2014 against the government of Kiev, both Donetsk and neighboring Lugansk -both with a population of Russian cultural tradition and language- proclaimed themselves in separate referendums as independent, but did not control more than a third of this territory in the last eight years. .
To do this, they relied on the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, which forced the Ukrainian government to give them regional autonomy and allow them their own elections, an issue that Kiev never respected and that was the origin of the current conflict between the two former Soviet republics.
More than 2.5 million people fled Ukraine
More than 2.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion, which enters its 16th day today, the UN announced on Friday.
“The number of refugees from Ukraine has tragically reached 2.5 million today. We also consider that two million people are displaced inside Ukraine,” the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a tweet. Filippo Grandi.
Source: Ambito
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