WARSAW —
Shelling and mortar fire picked up tempo overnight Saturday in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, with the heavy bombardment spurring fears a major military clash is in the offing.
The head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic Saturday issued a mobilization order for able-bodied males to present themselves to “military commissars” to sign up with local militias. Men aged between 18 and 55 also are being barred from leaving the pro-Russian self-styled republic on the eastern edge of Ukraine.
And in another alarming development, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree Saturday calling up army reservists for training and drills. Some analysts pointed out this is an annual event, but that it is normally conducted in April, not February. Yevhen Fedchenko, an Ukrainian academic who studies disinformation, says, “it's one more tool to sow uncertainty.”
Speaking at the Munich security conference Saturday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said a Russian plan already was unfolding. “There is a playbook of Russian aggression, and this playbook is too familiar to us all. Russia will plead ignorance and innocence. It will create false pretext for invasion, and it will amass troops and firepower in plain sight,” she told leading politicians and security ministers gathered for the annual meeting in the Bavarian capital.
Later at the conference, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the shock of any invasion of Ukraine by Russia would "echo around the world.” The British leader warned “the omens are grim.”
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported on Saturday more violations of an often-broken ceasefire agreed to in 2015 in the Donbas than a previous high on February 12.
Parts of the Donbas, which also includes the self-proclaimed republic of Luhansk, have been under de facto Russian occupation for the past eight years.
The OSCE reported more violations around Luhansk than Donetsk during the past two days, but even so, longtime observers say the shelling in and around Donetsk is the most intense they have seen in years.
On Friday the pro-Moscow separatist leaders, who are seen by Ukraine as puppets of the Kremlin, ordered a mass evacuation of civilians in posted videos, saying the Ukrainian army was planning an attack — an accusation vehemently denied by Kyiv.
According to the metadata of the videos, analyzed by experts, the broadcasts were prerecorded two days before, suggesting the evacuation, renewed shelling and other events, including an inexplicable car bombing, in Donbas are being orchestrated by the Kremlin, say Ukrainian officials, Western leaders and independent observers.
They accuse Moscow of building up a pretext for launching an offensive on Ukraine. Kremlin officials deny this, with Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov and other Russian diplomats accusing Western leaders of “hysteria” and “alarmism.” Saturday, Russian authorities claimed a shell, allegedly fired by Ukraine, exploded on Russian territory near a house in the village of Mityakinskaya in the southern Rostov region.
Western intelligence officials say the evacuation and mobilization orders and intensifying artillery and mortar fire, which they blame on the Russian separatists, are consistent with warnings that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made at a midweek presentation to the United Nations Security Council, where he accused Moscow of preparing ‘false flag’ operations that could be blamed on Kyiv but are in fact ordered by the Kremlin and conducted by its own forces or proxies.
Russian President Putin has maintained a drumbeat of accusations against Ukraine, accusing it of genocide against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and backing of armed proxies the same year in the Donbas was justified by the Kremlin on the grounds that it had to protect ethnic Russians. It was the same reason given for invading Georgia in 2008.
A Kremlin critic, Bill Browder, a British-American financier who was once based in Moscow, noted Friday that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tweeted word-for-word this week exactly the same remark he made on the eve of the Georgia invasion blaming the Kremlin’s foes for “provocative actions that have only intensified in the last day.”
However, independent analysts and military strategists are still split on whether what they describe as staged events in the Donbas are a prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, something U.S. President Joe Biden warned about Friday, saying he is now convinced that Putin has decided to invade Ukraine in coming days and that Russian forces will launch an assault on the capital, Kyiv.