Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that a member of the FSB had been killed in the weekend clashes as well as a serviceman from Russia’s airborne troops.
Advertisement
As soon as Russian Federation forced the last Ukrainian troops based in Crimea to leave in 2014, Moscow began setting up fortified border crossings and sending weapons to the peninsula – from cutting-edge fighter jets to the newest missile defense systems.
Russian President Vladimir Putin upped the ante Thursday morning when he directly accused the Ukrainian government of plotting the attacks and called a meeting of the country’s top brass to discuss boosting security in Crimea following reports of the foiled attacks.
The Kremlin on Thursday said Putin chaired a Security Council session to discuss “additional measures” to ensure security at Crimea’s de-facto border, the territorial waters around it and the Crimean airspace.
Russian Federation seized Crimea in 2014 after sending in thousands of special forces to take control of Ukrainian bases and holding a hastily organized referendum that was rejected by the worldwide community.
“These fantasies are only another pretext for the next military threats toward Ukraine”, Interfax news agency reported him as saying.
Ukraine on Thursday asked Russian Federation to provide the UN Security Council with evidence to back up its accusations of a terror plot by Kiev in Crimea.
Meanwhile a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation official told AFP that the US-led military alliance was monitoring the heightened Crimea tensions with concern.
“We are deeply concerned by the recent upsurge in violence in eastern Ukraine, and the increase in ceasefire violations along the line of contact, primarily by the Russian-backed militants”, said the official.
Moscow’s FSB security service said Wednesday it had thwarted “terrorist attacks” by Ukraine’s military on the Black Sea peninsula that Russian Federation seized from Ukraine in March 2014.
“They are trying to distract attention onto other things”, he said.
“The aim of the sabotage and terrorist attacks was to destabilize the social and political situation” ahead of elections in Russian Federation and Crimea next month, it said.
The EU and the U.S. have expressed scepticism about Russia’s allegations of a Ukrainian attack, with Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine tweeting that the U.S. “sees no confirmation” of Moscow’s claims. Kiev has called Panov a “hostage”.
Moscow and Kiev have been locked in a bitter dispute since the Kremlin seized Crimea in March 2014 after Ukraine’s Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted.
Putin said a mooted meeting with Poroshenko and mediators German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande at next month’s G20 summit in China was now “senseless”.
Advertisement
“The main political question now is what is the future of the Minsk process”, the paper wrote, referring to the peace deal hammered out in the Belarussian capital in February 2015.
