Putin and Russian troops were filmed on Monday entering Ukraine, as the country teeters for a potential Russian invasion according to the Reuters news agency.
According to the report, on the night of Monday to Tuesday, Putin and Russian troops with their armoured vehicles were observed circulating in Makiivka, in the suburbs of the city of Donetsk. Populated by more than 300,000 inhabitants, Makiïvka is located in eastern Ukraine, in the pro-Russian separatist zone of the People’s Republic of Donetsk.
Either in one of the two territories that Vladimir Putin recognized as independent in his Monday evening speech, and where he said he was sending troops to “keep the peace”.
The affiliation of the observed tanks to Russia could not be clearly established, but it is “very probable” according to the Reuters news agency, which filmed these images.
The same tactic deployed in Crimea?
For Patrick Sauce, columnist on international political issues at BFMTV, this inability to establish the origin of the tanks observed is part of what has already been done by Russia in previous conflicts, and in particular in Crimea, a Ukrainian region that Russia invaded in 2014.
“It reminds me of what I saw in Crimea in 2014. Where on convoys, very roughly, the first armoured vehicles, they had their license plates removed. And from the moment the inhabitants of Crimea , in a completely crazy referendum, had asked to be attached to Russia, we gave the Russian license plates”, he thus analyzed on BFMTV.
Between Friday evening and Sunday evening, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OCSE) recorded more than 3,000 violations of the ceasefire in the Donbass, an area where the province of Donetsk is located.