Ukraine at Risk of Full-Scale Invasion – Security Council Chief

“Ukraine today faces the threat of a full-scale invasion from various directions,” the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Andrei Parubiy, told a press briefing that was reported by the Ukrainian Crisis Media Centre.

Parubiy said numerous groupings of Russian military forces were deployed along the Ukrainian border. These forces had over 80,000 personnel, up to 270 tanks, up to 370 artillery pieces, up to 140 aircraft and 40 helicopters, and up to 19 warships and gunboats.

He stressed that the Russian troops were located very close to the Ukrainian border, some of them only two or three hours’ drive from Kiev.

Parubiy said the Ukrainians had possessed this information for some time now. The Russian leadership said previously that these were scheduled training exercises and the troops would be pulled back within five days. “But on the contrary, they are still building up their capacity,” he said.

He said the scenario planned for Ukraine’s southeastern regions was analogous that played out in Crimea – seizures of administrative buildings followed by demands for a referendum. But these plans had been foiled by coordinated actions by Ukrainian law-enforcement agencies and local government, he said. The former had already partially neutralised groups of saboteurs – many of them armed – who had been arrested in the Donetsk, Lugansk and Kherson regions.

Parubiy said Ukrainian interior ministry troops and special units were already in control of regional government offices and were overseeing law and order in southern and eastern Ukraine. Operations codenamed Cordon, Regime and Frontier had succeeded in preventing 3,700 Russian citizens suspected of extremist activities and sabotage from infiltrating Ukrainian territory. These included Russian propagandists and also members of elite Russian army special ops units whose aim was sabotage.

“We have succeeded in neutralising their attempts to destabilise the situation,” Parubiy said.

The Security and Defence council secretary said 399 refugees from Crimea had been counted so far. “These people fear their lives are threatened… They are coming to safe territory where we will ensure their constitutional rights are protected,” he said.

This article republished from Glavnoe.ua with kind permission. Original article in Russian.