Pro-Russian separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine ordered a full military mobilization Saturday, amid a spike in violence that has heightened fears that Moscow is planning to use an escalation in the conflict as a pretext to invade.
The announcements came ahead of planned large-scale drills involving Russian nuclear forces, overseen by President Vladimir Putin, offering a timely reminder of the country’s nuclear might, as Europe faces its gravest security crisis since the Cold War. Ballistic and cruise missiles were launched from land, air and sea the Kremilin said in a statement Saturday.
In eastern Ukraine, where the Moscow-supported separatists have been fighting government forces since 2014, Denis Pushilin, the head of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” urged reservists to show up at military enlistment offices in a video released on the chat app Telegram on Saturday.
In neighboring Luhansk, Leonid Pasechnik, leader of the self-proclaimed “Luhansk People’s Republic,” also signed a decree calling for “full combat readiness.”
The separatists control an enclave about the size of New Jersey, where it’s population of around 2 million speak Russian use the Russian ruble and hundreds of thousands have Russian passports.
Their statements came as the evacuation of civilians from the rebel-held territories in those regions to neighboring Russia continued.
At one evacuation point at a market in Donetsk, 38-year-old Oksana Feoktisova boarded a bus with her 9-year-old son and her mother. They were accompanied by Feoktisova’s brother Yuri who stayed behind in Donetsk.
“They don’t let men on, and I wouldn’t go frankly anyway,” Yuri told Reuters. “I’m a reservist in any case. I’m an artillery man by birth… I’m loyal to my state, to my people.”
The evacuations come amid a spike in shelling in the area that has stoked fresh global alarm. Ukraine’s military said a soldier was killed Saturday as a result of a shrapnel wound they received in the blasts.
Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said they recorded 648 cease-fire violations in the Luhansk region Friday and 222 in Donetsk. As a policy the OSCE does not tend to attribute blame.
Despite US concerns about him leaving the country, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will travel to the Germany city of Munich on Saturday for a security conference, his office said in a statement. There, he will meet Vice President Kamala Harris and other Western leaders before he returns to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.
In a speech at the conference Harris said that the “foundation of European security is under direct threat in Ukraine.” She added that the US “will impose significant and unprecedented economic costs,” on Russia were it to invade.
“Nations have a right to choose their own alliances,” she said, adding that “national borders should not be changed by force.”
Her speech came after President Joe Biden told reporters on Friday that he believed his Putin has already “made the decision” to invade Ukraine, but stressed Moscow should still “choose diplomacy.”
“It is not too late to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table,” Biden said.
Moscow has denied any plans to invade and has attempted to paint Ukraine as the aggressor instead. It said Friday it was closely watching the escalation of shelling in eastern Ukraine, describing the situation as potentially very dangerous.
But the US has warned for weeks Russia may used “false flag” operations including protests and unrest as an excuse to invade Ukraine. Together with its Western allies, it estimates Russia has massed as many as 190,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders.
The Kremlin now has between 40-50 percent of its military forces around Ukraine in attack position, a US defense official told NBC News Friday. The troops are still several miles from the border, the official said.
Oksana Parafeniuk, Veronica Melkozerova, Associated Press other Reuters contributed.
