MOSCOW — Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday called the arrival of U.S. military trainers in western Ukraine a “provocation” and warned Ukrainians and their leaders that they should rethink the consequences of hosting the Western forces.
“U.S.-Ukrainian military drills in the western Ukrainian Lviv region threaten Russia’s security,” ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said in a statement carried by the official Tass news agency.
The Pentagon had previously announced that as many as 300 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, based in Italy, would be sent to the Lviv region on Ukraine’s western border to train Ukrainian servicemen.
Lukashevich said the American forces who arrived Thursday for their seven-month mission intended to teach Ukrainian soldiers “how to use overseas military equipment.” He added that discussion continues in the United States about sending arms to the Ukrainian government as well as the instructors.
“It is evident that they are not trying to bring peace to the country,” Lukashevich said of Washington’s military aid to Ukraine, which Moscow officials and state-controlled media portray as an anti-Russian collaboration.
“Kiev authorities and all the Ukrainian people should think about the possible consequences of such steps,” Lukashevich warned. “It is impossible to extinguish the fire of a civil war by weapons. This can be done only through a political dialogue between the warring parties.”
The Russian government statements calling the training mission provocative and a threat appeared to herald a backlash that will probably put further pressure on an already shaky cease-fire and weapons pullback underway following a Feb. 12 agreement in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus.
The U.S.-Russian relationship, already at its lowest point since the end of the Cold War, could be significantly damaged if “the citizens of Donbass start being killed with the use of the U.S. weapons,” the Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying by Tass.
Donbass is the name of the industrial and mining region that spans the Don River basin near the Ukrainian-Russian border where Moscow-backed separatists have seized territory and proclaimed autonomous “people’s republics.”
No decision has been made in Washington on sending lethal aid to Ukraine. The move was discussed ahead of the Minsk peace plan brokered by European diplomats, which at least temporarily put off the divisive issue of whether Western states should help the outgunned Ukrainian forces defend themselves.
Newly confirmed Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is among the senior Obama administration and congressional figures pushing for more effective military aid to Ukraine. About 6,000 people have died since fighting broke out 11 months ago following Russia’s seizure and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea territory.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast last year’s ouster of Kremlin-allied Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich as a U.S.-inspired coup d’etat that brought pro-European and pro-NATO officials to power in Ukrainian elections last year. Putin has vehemently opposed NATO membership for Ukraine and lashed out at Western military support of any kind for his nation’s southwestern neighbor.
