18th February, 2022
A car bomb in Donetsk, a rumoured offensive by Ukrainian military against the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbass may provide excuses for Russia to invade Ukraine.
This is despite the denial of Ukrainian armed forces that they have embarked on liberating the territories.
Nonetheless, evacuation of civilians in the two breakaway republics has begun, Russia’s Sputnik News reported.
“Sputnik goes live from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine where the emergency evacuation of civilians has started.
“This comes after the republic’s head Denis Pushilin called on local residents to evacuate to Russia, claiming that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was going to order an invasion of the breakaway republic.
“The head of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, also urged local residents to prepare to flee to Russia.
“The situation on the contact line between Ukraine and the DPR and LPR has worsened in the past 24 hours after Kiev intensified shelling of the territories of the self-proclaimed republics”, Sputnik New reported.
But Reuters described the sudden evacuation of civilians as a shock turn in a conflict the West believes Moscow plans to use as justification for all-out invasion of Ukraine.
Warning sirens blared in Donetsk after it and the other self-proclaimed region, Luhansk, announced an evacuation to Russia, with women, children and the elderly going first.
Hours later, a Russian UAZ jeep exploded outside the rebel government building in the city of Donetsk, capital of the region by the same name.
Reuters journalists saw the vehicle surrounded by shrapnel, a wheel tossed away by the blast.
Most of the several million civilians in the two rebel-held areas of eastern Ukraine are Russian speakers, with many already granted citizenship by Moscow.
Within hours of the surprise announcement, families assembled at an evacuation point in Donetsk to board buses for Russia. One weeping woman embraced her teenage children.
Irina Lysanova, 22, just back from a trip to Russia, said she was packing to return with her pensioner mother: “Mama is a panicker,” she said. “Dad is sending us away.”
Her father, Konstantin, 62, was not going.
“This is my motherland and the land is ours. I will stay and put out the fires,” he said.
The evacuation came after the simmering eastern Ukraine conflict zone saw what some sources described as the most intense artillery bombardment for years on Friday.
Ukraine’s government and the separatists traded blame.
Western countries have said they think the shelling, which began on Thursday and intensified in its second day, is part of a pretext created by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government to justify an invasion of Ukraine.
MOST SIGNIFICANT MOBILISATION SINCE WW2
With global markets anxious and Europe engulfed in a diplomatic crisis, Russia said this week it had started withdrawing troops from the border near Ukraine.
But the United States said it had instead done the opposite: ramping up the force menacing its neighbour to between 169,000 and 190,000 troops, from 100,000 at the end of January.
Western countries fear a conflict on a scale unseen in Europe at least since the Yugoslav and Chechen wars of the 1990s, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and sent millions to flight.
Ukraine is the second biggest country in Europe by area after Russia, and home to 40 million people.
“This is the most significant military mobilisation in Europe since the Second World War,” U.S. ambassador Michael Carpenter told a meeting at the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Ukraine said Russia was planning staged attacks, including a faked video of a raid on a chemical plant, and falsely accusing it of provocations in the separatist areas.
“Ukrainian forces are not planning any offensive operations, and will not use weapons if this might threaten peaceful civilians,” the Ukrainian military said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Munich Security Conference that rather than a Russian pullback, “on the contrary, we see additional forces going to the border including leading edge forces that would be part of any aggression.”
Putin Orders Aid to Russia’s Rostov Region Amid Influx of Refuges From Donbass
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday instructed the Emergency Situation Ministry (EMERCOM) to provide assistance to the southern region of Rostov amid an unprecedented influx of refugees coming from eastern Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Earlier in the day, Rostov Region Governor Vasily Golubev asked Putin for assistance as record numbers of refugees were arriving in Russia from Donbas amid a sharp increase in shelling.
“Putin held a phone conversation with the acting head of EMERCOM, Chupriyan Alexander, and ordered him to urgently fly to the Rostov Region to organize on-site work on creating conditions for accommodation [for refugees], provision of hot meals and other necessities, including medical care,” Peskov said.
The press office of the Russian government told Sputnik that all refugees from self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics will receive a one-time payment of 10,000 rubles ($129.5) in emergency assistance.