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U.N. calls emergency meeting on Ukraine crisis

28 August 2014 18:39 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The U.N. Security Council called an emergency meeting on the Ukraine crisis for Thursday afternoon only hours after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared that "Russian forces have entered Ukraine."

The meeting, scheduled for 2 p.m. ET, was requested by Lithuania.

Ukraine has charged that at least two convoys of Russian military equipment entered southeastern Ukraine this week to open up a third front in the fighting between Ukrainian armed forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern regions.

More than 2,000 people have died in fighting in eastern Ukraine, according to a recent U.N. report. Russian-backed rebels have declared two regions as independent republics and the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk have been largely surrounded by Ukrainian forces.

Poroshenko, who met only two days ago with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to ease tensions in Ukraine, had called for U.N. action in a televised statement to the nation, saying, "The world must provide assessment of sharp aggravation of the situation in Ukraine."

In Brussels, Brig. Gen. Nico Tak told reporters at NATO headquarters Thursday that the alliance had noted a "significant escalation in both the level and sophistication of Russia's military interference in Ukraine" in the past two weeks.

"Russia is reinforcing and resupplying separatist forces in a blatant attempt to change the momentum of the fighting, which is currently favoring the Ukrainian military," Tak said.

NATO also produced satellite images to provide what it called "additional evidence that Russian combat soldiers, equipped with sophisticated heavy weaponry, are operating inside Ukraine's sovereign territory."

One senior military officer said NATO believes well over 1,000 Russian troops are operating inside Ukraine, Reuters reports, but referred to the Russian actions as "incursions" rather than invasion.

Geoffrey Pratt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, also weighed in on Thursday, writing on Twitter that Russian troops are now directly intervening in Ukraine because of a flagging military effort by rebels.

"Russian supplied tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and multiple rocket launchers have been insufficient to defeat Ukraine' armed forces," Pratt writes. "So now an increasing number of Russian troops are intervening directly in fighting on Ukrainian territory. "

As charges of a Russian incursion mounted, Andrey Kelin, Russia's representative to the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has an international monitoring group in Ukraine, denied the allegations. "We have said that no Russian involvement has been spotted, there are no soldiers or equipment," he said, the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reports.

"Accusations relating to convoys of armored personnel carriers have been heard during the past week and the week before that," he said. "All of them were proven false back then, and are being proven false again now."