Russian Airstrike at NATO’s Doorstep Raises Fears of Expanded War

 

    Russia launched a barrage of airstrikes on Sunday against a military base in western Ukraine where American troops had trained Ukrainian forces just weeks earlier, bringing the war 11 miles from the border with Poland, where NATO forces are stationed on high alert.

Western officials said the attack at NATO’s doorstep was not merely a geographic expansion of the Russian invasion but a shift of tactics in a war many already worried might metastasize into a larger European conflic“He’s expanding the number of targets,” the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, adding that “he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”

In recent days, Russian forces have been broadening their air war right up to the border with Poland, said John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. Before Sunday’s attack, Russian missiles also struck airfields in Lutsk and Ivano-Frankovsk, cities in western Ukraine near the Polish border. The airport in Ivano-Frankovsk was struck again on Sunday, according to the city’s mayor.
Pentagon and NATO officials reiterated on Sunday that they did not intend to directly confront Russian forces in Ukraine. But they are sending military supplies, and Russia has warned that it regards those convoys as legitimate targets.

The military base that was hit, which is called the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, has been a hub for Western military troops to train Ukrainian forces since 2015. Troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, among others, have trained 35,000 Ukrainians there under a project called “Operation Unifier.”
But Western nations withdrew their forces ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the base has been used by Ukraine to train and organize the thousands of foreigners who have arrived in the country and volunteered to help defend it.

The Russian missiles struck the base during the predawn hours Sunday.

“They hit us when we were sleeping,” said one of the volunteer fighters, Jesper Söder, a Swede who had arrived at the base three days earlier. “We woke up to them bombing a building.”
 At least 35 people were killed and 134 were wounded in the strikes, including both military personnel and civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it killed 180 foreign fighters in the strikes. Neither figure could be independently confirmed.

Two senior Pentagon officials said the U.S. military believes the sites in western Ukraine were struck by cruise missiles fired from Russian warplanes. It was unclear where the Russian bombers were when they fired the missiles. Ukrainian officials said the planes had flown from Saratov, in southwestern Russia.

Until Sunday, the invasion of Ukraine, now in its 18th day, was most notable for Moscow’s indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, and even as it bombarded the military base in the west, Russia continued to punish ordinary Ukrainians.In the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, a Russian airstrike on a residential neighborhood killed nine people.

And in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces fired on a train carrying Ukrainian civilians, including more than 100 children, who were attempting to flee the violence. The train’s conductor was killed and Ukraine’s national railroad scrambled to send a new train to evacuate the surviving crew and passengers.

In the suburbs of Kyiv, Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist working to document the toll the war has taken on refugees, was killed. Mr. Renaud, 50,  had contributed to The New York Times in previous years, most recently in 2015.
Still, in the coming weeks, NATO plans to gather 30,000 troops from 25 countries in Norway for biannual military exercises, including live-fire drills. The exercises were announced more than eight months ago, but the training has taken on greater significance as the fighting in Ukraine approaches the Polish border and raises alarm across the alliance.

About 10,000 American troops — half of which were deployed since the invasion began — are now stationed in Poland. Late last week, the United States moved two surface-to-air missile batteries there from Germany. And on Saturday, President Biden approved sending an additional $200 million in arms and equipment to Ukraine.
Among the options under discussion are transfers of similar equipment from NATO members in Eastern Europe, though there is concern these nations might then be left vulnerable themselves, U.S. officials said. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is scheduled to meet with NATO defense ministers in Brussels this week and then travel to Slovakia, a NATO member located south of Poland on Ukraine’s western border.

American military officials say they believed that, after weeks of pummeling other parts of the country, Russia has begun to target western Ukraine in a bid to shut it down as a base of operations for the Ukrainian air force and a source of weapons and equipment. Arms and aid have flowed into western Ukraine from Poland and Romania.

nytimes