NATO warns Russia over Ukraine military build-up
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[November 15, 2021]
By Sabine Siebold and Robin Emmott
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO Secretary-General
Jens Stoltenberg warned Russia on Monday that the western military
alliance was standing by Ukraine amid a large and unusual concentration
of Russian troops on Ukraine's borders.
Stressing that the important thing now was to prevent situations from
spiralling out of control, Stoltenberg urged Russia to be transparent
about military activities, to reduce tensions and prevent an escalation.
"We have to be clear-eyed, we need to be realistic about the challenges
we face. And what we see is a significant, large Russian military
build-up," Stoltenberg told a news conference with Ukraine's Foreign
Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Brussels.
He said he did not want to speculate about Russia's intentions but
added: "We see an unusual concentration of troops, and we know that
Russia has been willing to use these types of military capabilities
before to conduct aggressive actions against Ukraine."
The Russian troop movements have over the past days spurred fears of a
possible attack. Moscow has dismissed such suggestions as inflammatory
and complained about increasing activity in the region by the NATO
transatlantic alliance.
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Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and says the waters around it
belong to Moscow now, despite most countries continuing to recognise the
peninsula as Ukrainian.
Russian-backed separatists took control of Ukraine's eastern Donbass
region that same year and soldiers on both sides continue to be
regularly killed in the conflict there.
The troop border build-up - which Ukraine last week estimated at 100,000
- was dangerous, said Stoltenberg, because it reduced the amount of
warning time, should Russia decide to "conduct a military aggressive
action against Ukraine."
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![](../images/111521PIX/news_w43.jpg)
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during a news
conference following the talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy in Kiev, Ukraine October 31, 2019. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich/File
Photo
![](../images/ads/current/centraldirect_lda_SPONSOR_2021.png)
"This is partly forces close to the border between
Russia and Ukraine, but it is also partly troops and capabilities
which are inside Ukraine, meaning they are in Crimea, which is
illegally annexed, and also we see the militants, the separatists in
Donbass, which is also part of Ukraine, supported and helped by
Russia," he said.
A NATO source, asked to describe how Russia is going about deploying
its military equipment towards Ukraine, said: "large equipment such
as tanks, self-propelled artillery and infantry fighting vehicles is
moved at night to avoid tell-tale pictures showing up on social
media as they did during the Russian military build-up in spring."
"It can go either way," Lithuania's foreign minister Gabrielius
Landsbergis told reporters, also on Monday, on the margins of a
meeting with his European Union counterparts.
The West cannot exclude a Russian attack on Ukraine while
international attention is focused on the Belarus migration crisis,
or that Russia establishes a permanent military presence in Belarus,
he said.
"I would not exclude that as a possibility," he said.
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold and Robin Emmott; Writing by Ingrid
Melander; Editing by Alex Richardson, William Maclean)
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