US Leading Peacekeeping Drill in Western Ukraine
The U.S. military is leading peacekeeping exercises in western Ukraine involving 15 nations, as President Barack Obama prepares to host Ukraine’s leader for talks at the White House later this week.
The Defense Department announced the 12-day exercise earlier this month, saying 1,300 personnel would take part, including 200 U.S. soldiers.
Exercise Rapid Trident, which launched Monday and will go through September 26, is being conducted near Yavoriv at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center (IPSC), approximately 60 kilometers from the city of Lviv in western Ukraine.
Yavoriv, UkraineYavoriv, Ukraine
Even though the exercices are held annually, the deployment is the first involving U.S. ground troops to Ukraine since the crisis began there earlier this year. The Pentagon says the objective of the exercise is to increase interoperability among the United States, Ukraine and other participating nations.
Yavoriv is located approximately 1,000 kilometers from Ukraine’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where Ukrainian troops have been fighting pro-Russia separatists. Skirmishes there continue despite a cease-fire agreement having been reached September 5.
Foreign ministers discuss Ukraine
Also Monday, the foreign ministers of Russia, France and Germany met in Paris to discuss the crisis in Ukraine, a French diplomatic source said.
The meeting took place just after a Paris conference on the threat of the Islamic State insurgency in Iraq and Syria, a gathering attended by ministers from 26 countries and three international agencies.
The talks came ahead of a meeting between President Barack Obama and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Washington scheduled for Thursday.
A White House spokesman said Friday that Obama and Poroshenko will discuss diplomatic ways to end the crisis when they meet Thursday, and that the talks will highlight the U.S. commitment to “stand with Ukraine” in its pursuit of democracy and stability.
While in the U.S. capital, Poroshenko is also due to address a joint session of Congress.
On the ground
Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council spokesman Monday accused separatist rebels in the country’s east of attacking civilian areas they control near the government-held Donetsk Airport, and trying to lay blame for the hostilities on Ukrainian troops.
Kyiv says its troops repelled a rebel attack on the airport over the weekend. Independent observers on the scene could not say who fired the shells that hit the civilian areas.
Spokesman Andriy Lysenko blamed the rebels. Citing local residents, he said that separatists are firing artillery and missiles into residential areas in an effort to discredit Ukrainian forces. He said in some cases rebel supporters paint Ukrainian flags on missile fragments.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reported Sunday that its monitors visited a market in Donetsk that appeared to have been shelled, and while there, four mortar rounds exploded about 200 meters from them. The OSCE said the monitors moved to another location a kilometer away, and reported another mortar shell hitting about 100 meters from their position.
Donetsk city officials said Monday that the shelling killed six city residents and wounded 15 others.
Despite ongoing hostilities, the sides had their largest prisoner exchange, with 73 fighters from each side going home Sunday.
Crimea ‘connection’
Following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, many observers suspected that pro-Russia rebels, many of whom are believed to be Russian troops armed by Moscow, would attempt to establish a land corridor to connect Russian mainland with the peninsula.
Now, experts believe that rebel set-backs on the ground as well as a third round of economic sanctions the West imposed on Moscow Friday might have forced separatists to abandon efforts, at least for now, to push further along the 350 kilometer long strip of land.
“That was the plan. But, you know, it’s necessary to be mad enough to try to establish this corridor in the current situation, because then the fourth round of sanctions is nearly inevitable,” said Russian exile and military expert Igor Sutyagin, now at London’s Royal United Services Institute.
Russia has been consistently denying that it has troops on the ground in Ukraine or that it in any way supports the separatists movement in the country’s east.
However, rights activists in Russia as well as groups of soldiers’ mothers point to growing evidence that Russian troops are not only involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, but are getting wounded or killed there.
Al Pessin contributed to this report from Kyiv. Some material for the story came from Reuters.