Ukraine gave warning today that Russia could deploy nuclear missiles to
the Crimea as part of a massive military build-up in the volatile region.
Andrii Taran, Ukraine’s defence minister, said that Russia might also be planning to attack his country to secure water supplies for the Black Sea peninsula, which was annexed by the Kremlin in 2014. Crimea has suffered water shortages since Ukraine built a dam that cut off supplies to the region in 2017.
“Crimea’s infrastructure is being prepared for potentially storing nuclear weapons,” Taran, 66, told a European parliament defence committee. His comments came before an emergency meeting of defence and foreign ministers from Nato member states that was called because of the crisis. Taran did not provide evidence for his claims.
Kiev says that Russia has amassed about 80,000 troops on its borders with Ukraine in its biggest show of force in the region since a peace deal ended large-scale fighting in 2015. Nato has called Russia’s moves “unjustified, unexplained and deeply concerning”. President Biden has vowed that the United States will stand behind Ukraine.
As part of its build-up, Russia has sent tanks, rocket artillery and short-range ballistic missiles to a newly established military base in the Voronezh region, which is 150 miles from Ukraine. Russia also said today that its navy had begun a training exercise in the Black Sea before the arrival of two US warships in the region. Sergei Shoygu, the defence minister, said that Russia’s troop movements were a reaction to the “threatening military activity of Nato”, especially in Poland and the Baltic region.
Russia insists that it has no plans to attack Ukraine and the Kremlin has accused western countries of turning the region into a “powder keg”. A senior Kremlin official has said, however, that Russia would defend its citizens in the event of a Ukrainian military assault on breakaway regions controlled by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Russia has handed out up to 400,000 passports in the disputed region since 2019.
Biden has urged Russia to de-escalate border tensions and proposed a face-to-face meeting with President Putin on neutral territory. Senior officials in Moscow today welcomed the proposal.
Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian parliament’s international affairs committee, said that Biden’s offer represented a move by Washington “from confrontation to dialogue”.
Konstantin Kosachyov, the speaker of the Russian upper house, said: “Suggesting a third country means that this offer of a meeting was made in earnest.”
The Kremlin said that certain conditions would need to be met for a meeting to go ahead, but gave no details. The talks would be the first US-Russia summit since Putin met President Trump in Helsinki in 2018. President Zelensky of Ukraine is due to meet President Macron in France on Friday to discuss the crisis.