Russia Claims Soldiers Captured By Ukraine Crossed Border By Accident

The Russian government claims that a group of soldiers captured in eastern Ukraine had crossed the border by accident.

pro-Russian missile launcher as it drives in the town of Krasnodon.

Ukraine announced Tuesday that it had captured ten soldiers in the area of Amvrosiivka, near the Russian border in the Donetsk region.

The region has been torn apart by fighting between government troops and pro-Russian separatists who declared independence in the region in April.

The Facebook page for the anti-rebel operation -- which includes the military, the national guard and Interior Ministry forces -- said the soldiers are from a Russian paratrooper division.

The posting did not give details of how the capture took place.

Footage of five of the captives was also posted on the page and showed men dressed in camouflage fatigues.

One of the soldiers said they had been told they were being mobilized to take part in military exercises, The Associated Press reports.

Another soldier, who identified himself as Ivan Melchyakov, listed his personal details, including the name of the paratroop regiment he said is based in the Russian town of Kostroma, located on the Volga River northeast of Moscow.

"I did not see where we crossed the border," he said, according to Sky News.

"They just told us we were going on a 70-kilometer (43-mile) march over three days. 

"Everything is different here, not like they show it on television," Melchyakov continues.

"We've come as cannon fodder."

The BBC reported that another captive, who gives his name as Sgt. Andrei Generalov, said "Stop sending in our boys. Why? This is not our war. And if we weren't here, none of this would have happened."

Ukraine's Defense Minister seized on the capture, the first such event claimed by authorities, as proof that Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine alongside the separatists.

"Officially they are at exercises in various corners of Russia," Valeriy Geletey said, according to Sky News.

"In reality, they are participating in military aggression against Ukraine and their families know nothing about their true fate... I am addressing the relatives of Russian servicemen. Find out immediately where your loved ones are. Take them out of Ukraine, where they are being forced to die."

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti quoted an unnamed source in the Russian Defense Ministry as saying the soldiers were patrolling the border area and probably crossed the border inadvertently.

The confrontation came to light hours before talks between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko were due to begin in Minsk, Belarus.

The news is likely to add more tension to an encounter that was already highly unlikely to succeed in bringing an end to the conflict.

The United Nations has estimated that more than 2,000 people have died since the conflict began, while 330,000 are believed to have fled the area.

NATO has claimed that Russia has tens of thousands of troops positioned in areas near the Ukrainian border, leading to persistent concerns that Russia could be preparing an invasion.

Russia has denied that it has any intention of invading eastern Ukraine, and has also pushed back against accusations from Ukraine and Western nations that it has provided military support and training to the separatists or fired artillery into Ukraine itself.

Meanwhile, towering columns of smoke rose Tuesday from outside a city in Ukraine's far southeast after what residents said was a heavy artillery barrage.

It was the second straight day that attacks were reported in the vicinity of Novoazovsk, which is in eastern Ukraine's separatist Donetsk region but previously had seen little fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels.

Local residents, some hastily packing up in order to flee, told The Associated Press it was not clear what direction the firing had come from.

Ukrainian officials on Monday said artillery was fired from the Russian side of the border.

A Ukrainian soldier who declined to give his name suggested that Tuesday's shelling could have come from rebels aiming to take out a Ukrainian rocket launcher.

Before Peace Talks, Ukraine Says It Holds Russian Troops

Ukraine released video footage Tuesday of what it said were 10 captured Russian soldiers, raising tensions as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, for talks later in the day with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine.

Captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

Russia has consistently denied supporting pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine, and the video will step up pressure on the Kremlin to clarify its role in the fighting there.

In earlier peace talks between lower-ranking officials, Moscow’s position has prevented discussion of what Ukraine regards as the key to stopping the conflict — a Russian willingness to acknowledge, and halt, its support for rebels holed up in the eastern cities of Luhansk and Donetsk.

“It makes it very difficult to negotiate anything when Putin says he is not involved,” Michael A. McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Moscow and now a professor at Stanford University, said in a telephone interview.

Ukrainian forces have made steady progress in recent weeks against the rebels, driving them from a number of towns and villages, but the government says the advance has been slowed by an accelerating flow of arms and fighters from Russia to support the rebels.

After repeated accusations of Russian involvement that were not backed by any solid evidence, Ukraine on Tuesday released videos of men who, under interrogation, identified themselves as Russian soldiers captured on Ukrainian territory.

The men, who gave their names and military serial numbers, said they had been sent to Ukraine by their superiors after initially being told they were going on a training exercise. 

The videos surfaced on the Facebook page of Ukraine’s so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation, just hours before Putin was due to meet Mr. Poroshenko and senior officials of the European Union in Minsk.

The meeting between the two presidents, the first since a brief encounter in June, would not end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, analysts said, but should at least open the way for future talks.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who visited Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, over the weekend, dampened expectations for the Minsk meeting.

It “certainly won’t result in the breakthrough” that Germany and others were hoping for, she told a German newspaper.

The videos released by Ukraine may make it more difficult for the Kremlin to stick to its approach of simply denying that it has any hand in the fighting.

“Everything was a lie. There were no drills here,” one of the captured Russians, who identified himself as Sergey A. Smirnov, told a Ukrainian interrogator.

He said he and other Russians from an airborne unit in Kostroma, in central Russia, had been sent on what was described initially as a military training exercise but later turned into a mission into Ukraine.

After having their cellphones and identity documents taken away, they were sent into Ukraine on vehicles stripped of all markings, Smirnov said. 

RIA Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, quoted an unnamed source from Russia’s defense ministry as saying the men had crossed into Ukraine by accident.

“The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained,” the source said.

A spokesman for the Ukrainian military, Colonel Andriy Lysenko, disputed that account and accused Russia of sending the soldiers across the border on a “special mission,” Reuters reported.

Dmitri Trenin, an expert on Russian foreign policy and the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, predicted that Russia would persist with its denials but might be willing to quietly abandon its support over time as it shifted to other ways to pressure Kiev.

“There is no solution to the Ukraine issue any time soon,” Mr. Trenin said in a telephone interview from Moscow.

Russia has already cut off gas supplies to Ukraine, complaining that it has not been paid for previous deliveries, and energy shortages will grow increasingly painful for Ukraine as winter approaches.

Moscow’s long-term goal, Mr. Trenin said, is not to force Ukraine to recognize the rebels’ self-declared states but to ensure that Ukraine never joins NATO or allows Western troops on Ukrainian territory.

That goal could be accomplished, he said, by forcing Ukraine to make constitutional changes that would give eastern regions an effective veto over key decisions by the government in Kiev.

“We are still at the early stages of this monumental struggle,” he said.

“The eastern rebels may lose their battle and Putin may be willing to accept this as a tactical move. But he is not ready to accept defeat of Russia’s policy in Ukraine.”