Russian armored columns said to capture key Ukrainian town

Military leaders in Ukraine charged Russia was deepening its foray into Ukrainian territory and sending new troops to the Crimean border.

Aug. 27, 2014 Bystanders watch a fire consuming a school in downtown Donetsk after being hit by shelling. Several civilians died when their car was completely burned after being hit by shell fragments in central Donetsk, the rebel-held city in eastern Ukraine. Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images

By Annie Gowen and Karoun Demirjian 

KIEV, Ukraine — Russian forces in two armored columns captured a key southeastern coastal town near the Russian border Thursday after Ukrainian forces retreated in the face of superior firepower, a Ukrainian military spokesman said.
The two Russian columns, including tanks and armored fighting vehicles, entered the town of Novoazovsk on the Sea of Azov after a battle in which Ukrainian army positions came under fire from Grad rockets launched from Russian territory, according to the spokesman, Col. Andriy Lysenko.
“Our border servicemen and guardsmen retreated as they did not have heavy equipment,” Lysenko said in a statement.



Ukrainian authorities have denounced the latest fighting as a Russian invasion of their territory, intended to prop up pro-Moscow separatists who have been losing ground to Ukrainian forces and to open a new front in the southeastern corner of Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said earlier that Ukrainian troops were battling combined Russian and separatist forces on the new southern front around Novoazovsk, about eight miles west of the Russian border. The Ukrainian military also said Russian troops were increasing surveillance from northern Crimea, the autonomous Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in March.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatensyuk said Russian troops have entered Ukraine and are working with separatists east of Donetsk. (Reuters)

Lysenko said Thursday that the columns of Russian troops, tanks and artillery began entering Ukraine from Russian territory around 12:30 p.m. “Russian servicemen” also control several other localities around Novoazovsk, he said. There have been reports of a Russian BM-27 Uragan missile system in the area, Lysenko said, aggravating a situation that has become “more complicated” in the last 24 hours.
Ukrainian forces have begun fortifying positions around Mariupol, a key port city 28 miles west of Novoazovsk, in anticipation that Russia could be trying to secure a road link to annexed Crimea.
Over the past week, separatist rebels in the Luhansk region have been replaced by regular Russian troops, Lysenko said. In addition, Russian medical personnel and equipment arrived at a hospital in Krasnodon, close to the Russian border about 30 miles southeast of Luhansk, “after which wounded and killed mercenaries were mass-delivered to the hospital,” he said.
“The presence of doctors from the neighboring country on terrorist-controlled territory is yet another piece of evidence to the fact that regular Russian servicemen are involved in the conflict,” the spokesman said. He cited a “Mothers Committee” of Russian soldiers as saying that about 400 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine so far during the Russian intervention.
Firefights and shelling continued all day Wednesday and into the night around Novoazovsk, after Russian-backed separatists and Russian troops took control of villages north of the formerly quiet town, Lysenko said.
Referring to a “Russian-directed counteroffensive,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Wednesday: “Clearly, that is of deep concern to us, but we’re also concerned by the Russian government’s unwillingness to tell the truth, even as its soldiers are found 30 miles inside Ukraine.”
Widespread reports of Russian troop movements and fighting in Ukraine provoked renewed criticism from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose secretary general said in an interview with British reporters Wednesday that it will deploy forces at new bases in eastern Europe for the first time in response to the Ukraine crisis and to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the Guardian newspaper.

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Russian military allegedly enters and attacks Ukrainian forces.

“We have reports from multiple sources showing quite a lively Russian involvement in destabilizing eastern Ukraine,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “We have seen artillery firing across the border and also inside Ukraine. We have seen a Russian military buildup along the border. Quite clearly, Russia is involved in destabilizing eastern Ukraine. . . . You see a sophisticated combination of traditional conventional warfare mixed up with information and primarily disinformation operations. It will take more than NATO to counter such hybrid warfare effectively.”
Moscow will consider the activity of NATO forces near Russia’s borders in its own military planning, Russia’s envoy to NATO told the Interfax news agency Thursday.
“Obviously, we will take into consideration the configuration and activity of the NATO forces at the Russian borders in our military planning, and will take all that is necessary to reliably provide security and to ensure safety against any threats,” envoy Alexander Grushko told Interfax.

German leader Angela Merkel demanded an explanation from Putin for the Russian troop movements, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported. The conversation between the two leaders took place as fighting intensified, the BBC reported.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he has canceled his working visit to Turkey due to a “sharp aggravation” of the situation in the east, “as Russian troops were brought into Ukraine.”
Europe’s security agency, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has called an emergency meeting in Vienna on Ukraine, the BBC reported.
NATO’s Canadian delegation also posted a snarky map on its Twitter account with outlines of the countries titled “Russia” and “Not Russia” — a stab at Russian assertions that 10 paratroopers captured in Ukraine earlier this week wandered into the country by mistake.
A spokesman for Putin, Dmitry Peskov, brushed aside NATO’s criticism in an interview with Russian reporters Wednesday, according to Interfax.
“It's not a new declaration. They do this regularly and Russia regularly repeats its denial, declaring that this information doesn’t correspond with reality,” Peskov said.
Peskov also said that Russia planned to send a humanitarian convoy back into Ukraine, after days of intense negotiation over the last convoy of around 220 trucks that entered the country without permission or the support of the International Committee of the Red Cross last Friday. The trucks were purportedly used to bring food and relief supplies to besieged residents near Luhansk, one of two rebel strongholds in the east.

“A second humanitarian convoy can be sent very soon. The Russian side is ready to do it tomorrow, so long as this operation, like last time, will happen under the auspices of the ICRC and total interaction with the Ukrainian authorities, though we can't give a specific date,” Peskov said.
The increased fighting came after Tuesday’s meeting between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, who exchanged a chilly handshake at a regional summit and pledged some cooperation in the ongoing crisis. Putin and Poroshenko spent more than two hours in a private meeting Tuesday and, afterward, pledged cooperation on tightening Ukraine’s eastern border and humanitarian relief for besieged residents in battleground cities.
Yet even as both leaders gave lip service to the idea of peace, verbal sniping on both sides continued — as reports of Russian tanks and soldiers on the ground grew. At his news briefing Wednesday, Lysenko showed a new video of most of the Russian paratroopers. The deputy commander of the men said they had “illegally come into the territory of Ukraine” for what they thought was a military exercise and were captured and detained.
Russia may not want to talk cease-fire terms, but it also isn’t interested in breaking up Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
“We are not interested in breaking up the state,” Lavrov said, when asked at a youth forum why Russia has not yet recognized the rebels’ self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics as a state.

Ukrainian officials on Wednesday pushed back against Russia’s opposition to its desire to sign a trade agreement with the European Union, the genesis of the conflict that began in November. And Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatensyuk raised fears of a purported Russian plan to cut off gas supplies to Europe that go through Ukraine this winter. More than 15,000 were without gas in one Eastern city after the lines were cut, the Ukrainian military said Wednesday.
“Russia is and will be a reliable supplier of energy resources to Europe,” Peskov said. “We hope that Ukraine in turn will guarantee unhindered transit.”
Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine’s east is worsening, with thousands in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk without water and reliable food, and thousands more fleeing the southern city of Mariupol this week amid fears of a Russian invasion on the southern border. A U.N. report expected to be released Friday says that the death toll has dramatically worsened in recent weeks, with around 36 people dying daily, for a total of 2,200 killed in the conflict so far.

Demirjian reported from Moscow. William Branigin and Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this report.