“We have to be clear-eyed, we need to be realistic about the challenges we face. And what we see is a significant, large Russian military build-up,” Stoltenberg said.
“We see an unusual concentration of troops, and we know that Russia has been willing to use these types of military capabilities before to conduct aggressive actions against Ukraine,” he warned.
Stoltenberg elaborated that NATO believes the concentration of 100,000 or more Russian troops close to Ukraine, combined with separatist fighters allied with Moscow already operating in the Donbass region and Russian troops in the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula, means Russia could decide to “conduct a military aggressive action against Ukraine” with very little notice.
“What we see along our border is a sophisticated military infrastructure, rolled out during the spring escalation, that is ready to be used for offensive operations against Ukraine,” Kuleba said from Brussels.
“I cannot speculate on the exact scale of those operations, but back in 2014 it was unimaginable that Crimea would be seized by Russia. Therefore, I cannot exclude any scenario at this point,” he said.
A NATO source told Reuters on Monday that Russia has been moving “large equipment such as tanks, self-propelled artillery and infantry fighting vehicles” to the Ukrainian border at night, to avoid filling social media with photos and videos of the deployment.
The NATO official said this was a troubling contrast with Russia’s military buildup last year, which was conducted in broad daylight with copious social-media coverage and was therefore seen as more of a political ploy to increase pressure on the Ukrainian government. The implication was that moving heavy equipment by night means the Russians are more serious about actually using it this time around.
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