Dhe government of Ukraine has been walking a difficult tightrope for many weeks. On the one hand, it is important to her that the threat to the country from the deployment of Russian troops is recognized both in Ukraine and worldwide and countermeasures are organized. On the other hand, she wants to avoid doubts about the normal course of life in the country and the willingness to defend herself and thus avoid panic and panic buying. Occasionally there were differences in the assessments, such as those of America and Great Britain – based on the findings of their secret services and satellite images – and those of Ukraine.
On Tuesday, for example, Defense Minister Oleksiy Resnikov visited parliament to inform MPs about the situation. “The intelligence services find out that units of the Russian armed forces have been permanently concentrated along our borders,” the minister said afterwards in the parliamentary corridor. “The facts that the services of our country and our partner countries have identified are absolutely congruent. But the reviews differ a bit.”
The Russian troop strength is now roughly the same as before Easter 2021, when large-scale Russian maneuvers had already kept Ukraine and Europe in suspense. There are now around 109,000 Russian soldiers in the land forces near the border and on the annexed peninsula of Crimea, with the air force and navy there being “slightly more”. A border strip of Russia 200 kilometers deep is evaluated. There is now a lot of movement there, and the troops are practicing operations. However, he could say “very precisely”: At the present time – that is, on Tuesday – the Russian troops had not formed a shock squad “that could carry out a violent incursion into Ukraine”.
Bomb threats are a real plague
That had sounded more menacing before. In mid-November, Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, told the American specialist portal Militarytimes.com that Russia had massed 92,000 troops around Ukraine and was planning to attack “at the end of January or beginning of February”. This could be done with tank, artillery and air strikes, followed by landing operations from the air and from the Black and Azov Seas. The recent “Sapad” (West) maneuvers have shown that Russia can simultaneously deploy 3,500 paratroopers and special forces men. An advance of smaller units via the neighboring country Belarus is also conceivable. Before all this happens, there will probably be “psychological operations” to destabilize Ukraine from within, said General Budanov, who was young at 36 but already had combat experience in eastern Ukraine. Russia may try to “incite riots through protests and demonstrations that would show that the people are against the government”.
If anonymous bomb threats are part of the “psychological operations” mentioned, then the perpetrators are already very active. Bomb threats have become a plague in Ukraine since Russia began its aggression in 2014. Last week, the Ukrainian secret service SBU said there had been more than 1,100 bomb threats in the country in 2021, and 313 people involved had been identified. By January 21, there were another 300 cases. As a result, all schools in the city of Lviv had to be evacuated on Friday, as had happened in other major cities shortly before. Other threats apply to administration buildings, train stations and subway stations. In most cases, according to the SBU, the tracks led to Russia, Belarus and the separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine. Opposing intelligence services also took advantage of the dissatisfaction of Ukrainian citizens, who then sent out such bomb alerts.
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