The bloody siege of Debaltseve, a Ukrainian town that was finally seized by pro-Russian separatists this week in defiance of a ceasefire agreement, claimed the lives of at least 179 Ukrainian soldiers, a senior official said Saturday.
Yuriy Biryukov, a presidential adviser and assistant to the defense minister, posted on Facebook that the soldiers had died in the Debaltseve area between January 18 and February 18, when Ukrainian forces withdrew.
An additional 110 soldiers were taken hostage and 81 are missing, Biryukov said. Some of the missing are still on their way out of Debaltseve, he said, while others have died.
The toll makes the siege of Debaltseve, a strategic railroad hub now shattered by heavy shelling, the deadliest single incident of the 10-month conflict for the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council said Friday there had been 300 instances of violation of the ceasefire since it came into force Sunday in eastern Ukraine.
The ceasefire — hammered out last week in Minsk, Belarus, among the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany — is supposed to be followed by a withdrawal of heavy weaponry to create a buffer zone, the release of prisoners by both sides and steps toward new elections.
But efforts to stop the fighting have met with limited success so far.
Western leaders have steadfastly accused Russia of failing to rein in separatists and of continuing to arm, supply and train them. European nations, the United States and others have imposed sanctions on Russian interests in hopes of applying pressure on Vladimir Putin to help end the hostilities.
Russia denies any direct involvement and says any Russian soldiers in Ukraine are volunteers fighting in their vacation time.
Months of devastating fighting since have left nearly 5,700 people dead as of February 18, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported Friday. More than 1 million people have been displaced, the United Nations says.
Shot Maidan activists remembered
On Friday, Ukraine marked one year since the bloodiest day of protests in Kiev’s Maidan, or Independence Square, against the country’s then Russian-leaning leader.
Some 49 people died on February 20, 2014 and close to 100 more suffered gunshot wounds when, according to protesters, government snipers opened fire on them.
Two days later, President Viktor Yanukovych would flee the country, prompting Ukrainian activists to declare “victory in the Maidan” and promise a new day for a country long torn between its neighbors, Europe to the west and Russia to the east.
How things have changed. Today, the country is a powder keg driving spiraling tensions between the West and Moscow.
In remarks Friday, President Petro Poroshenko claimed Russia had been working toward the breakup of Ukraine since before Yanukovych was ousted.
“Moscow was preparing to the liquidation and tearing Ukraine apart long before the victory of Maidan. They were expecting the fall of Yanukovych and accelerated the course of events,” Poroshenko said to the families of protesters who died a year ago.
According to Ukrainian prosecutors, 77 people died in total during the 2014 protests, which were sparked by Yanukovych’s decision to scrap a trade deal with the European Union and instead turn toward Russia.
The ensuing ouster of Yanukovych triggered a chain of events that never could have been predicted.
By March, Russia had annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Weeks later, in April, pro-Russian separatist forces launched their bid to carve off the more Russian-leaning eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions from the rest of Ukraine.
NATO deputy leader: Russia poses existential threat
In a speech to a London-based defense think-tank, the Royal United Services Institute, Britain’s senior officer in NATO, Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, warned that Russia’s ambitions could pose an “existential threat” to the world.
Russia is currently employing a “hybrid combination” of “coercion through rapidly generated conventional forces and subversion, through a number of means, both military and non-military,” he said.
This hybrid strategy can be used to set the scene for a “subversive takeover of territory,” as seen in its takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula last year shortly after large-scale military exercises by Russia on its side of the border, he said.
“We are today seeing conventional forces employed, albeit subject to continued brazen denials by the Kremlin, in eastern Ukraine,” he added.
Russia’s new strategy holds particular dangers for NATO, he said. Firstly, the use of subversive tactics initially makes it difficult to identify clearly “the hand of a hostile state government” in destabilization of a country, making collective decisions harder.
Secondly, its ability rapidly to generate large scale forces “could in future be used not only for intimidation and coercion but potentially to seize NATO territory, after which the threat of escalation might be used to prevent reestablishment of territorial integrity,” he said.
And, Bradshaw pointed out, Russia is not the only threat to NATO states, citing also the danger posed by terror groups such as ISIS, also known as ISIL.
“Whilst the threat from Russia, together with the risk it brings of a miscalculation resulting in a slide into strategic conflict, however unlikely we see that as being right now, represents an obvious existential threat to our whole being, we of course face threats from ISIL and other instabilities to our way of life and the security of our loved ones.”