Ukrainians say there’s no end to Putin’s aggression

The winter is kind this morning on the vast, mournful emptiness of the steppe.

The sun rises into a cloudless sky over a dry, frozen earth.

Crunching into the frost, a Ukrainian soldier approaches for our passports at a checkpoint. “You are from Europe, then?”

But it is far more statement than question.

“You tell them we need arms – or you will have world war three here. Believe me, Putin will not stop.”

Read more: Ukraine: Minsk is not what matters

If reports from the Ukrainian military are credible, Putin is indeed not stopping. Fifty tanks and 40 missile systems crossed from Russia into east Ukraine overnight, even as the Minsk talks were grinding along.

The Ukrainians say they entered Russia via the Izvaryne border crossing into the separatist Luhansk region.

“The enemy continues to strengthen its forces in the most dangerous areas, especially north east Luhansk in the direction of Debaltseve,” spokesman Andriy Lysenko said in his daily briefing yesterday.

Amnesty International says it remains deeply concerned for civilians trapped by the fighting in and around Debaltseve, with both sides now given till midnight Saturday to grab any land they can by any means necessary, under the proposed Minsk peace deal.

And after that, who knows? But the situation is certainly very much more complex than the simplistic Big Bad Putin mantra so often heard in the west.

Putin is undoubtedly long on aggression, short on nuance. But he is playing to a receptive audience at home in all this, and his argument that Nato – a hostile force – has unreasonably expanded eastward to threaten Russia, certainly bears scrutiny.

Put that against the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine, where so many people are ethnic Russians, and you begin to see why the notion that this is simply a Moscow land-grab is one-dimensional.

Equally, Putin’s tactics become increasingly ludicrous. On the one hand, the denials that any Russian forces are in Ukraine, on the other the manifest presence of Russian-speaking, well-equipped, disciplined soldiers with modern tanks and sophisticated missile systems, is all dismissed by Moscow as “mere volunteers”.

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