The US news website thedailybeast reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin says he has ordered a partial withdrawal of forces, but satellite images present a picture of a complexity of the massive military buildup that threatens Ukraine.
He explained that pictures taken by a commercial photography company show that Moscow built a pontoon bridge, on Tuesday, on the Pripyat River, close to the Russian-Belarus border.
The bridge is located near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl reactor, which exploded in 1986.
This development comes at a time when the state of alert controls the Ukrainian and NATO forces, amid conflicting signals about the strengthening of the Russian mobilization on Ukraine’s borders, which is unprecedented for decades.
Analysts fear that the bridge is one of the many possible routes that Russian forces, currently deployed in Belarus, will take towards Ukrainian territory.
The researcher specializing in Russian military affairs, Rob Lee, noted that engineering units and bridge-building equipment entered Belarus in early February.
For its part, the Belarusian Ministry of Defense said that the Russian forces, which are participating in the current exercises in Belarus, carried out an operation to cross a water barrier in the Pripyat River.
And the new bridge in Belarus isn’t the only development spotted by satellites this week. While at least some images have shown a decline in Russia’s military buildup in Crimea, images taken elsewhere in the region show that Moscow has expanded its reach.