Putin’s ‘little green men’ aiding Ukrainian separatists, says Biden

Russia is using “little green men without patches” to help separatists destabilize Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin redraw the map of eastern Europe, Vice President Joe Biden said Friday, as the leaders of France and Germany headed to Moscow to make a last-ditch bid for peace in the troubled region.

Biden spoke in Brussels, where he met with European Union officials as part of a flurry of diplomatic efforts to stem Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. Some 5,300 people have been killed in fighting that began in April, mostly in the eastern portion of the country that borders Russia. Although Putin has insisted he has not sent troops to help pro-Russian separatists fight Kiev’s forces, Biden said the Russian leader has been aiding the independence movement since annexing Crimea in March, 2014.

“Ukraine is fighting for their very survival right now,” Biden said. “Russia continues to escalate the conflict by sending mercenaries and tanks we euphemistically [call] “little green men without patches,” in who are very sophisticated special operations soldiers,” Biden said.

Russian forces are suspected by the west of helping separatists down a Malaysian Airlines commercial plane carrying 298 people over Ukraine near the Russian border last July in what may have been a mistake. Kiev released intercepted phone conversations, purportedly between separatists and Russian military officials, and the missile that downed the plane was Russian-made. Ukraine has alleged that Russian troops became emboldened following the incident, sending non-uniformed troops across the border to aid in fighting in rebel strongholds such as Donetsk.

Although German Chancelor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande were to meet with Putin in Moscow to press him for peace, suspicions were growing in Europe that the powerful Russian leader has designs on more than just Ukraine.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Britain’s Daily Telegraph Thursday that Putin’s goal was to reassert Russian dominance of Eastern Europe by testing, and ultimately fracturing the West’s bedrock Cold War alliance.

“There is a high probability that he will intervene in the Baltics to test NATO’s Article 5,” Rasmussen said, referring to the section of NATO’s charter mandating that other member states come to the defense of a fellow member under armed attack. “Putin knows that if he crosses the red line and attacks a NATO ally, he will be defeated. Let us be quite clear about that. But he is a specialist in hybrid warfare.”

All three of the so-called Baltic republics — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — were part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. All three joined NATO in 2004. All three also have sizable minority populations of ethnic Russians, as does eastern Ukraine, where Putin is accused of whipping up secession sentiment. Rasmussen says his fear is that Moscow will generate a conflict that gives him a pretext to destabilize those nations. It is not clear what would happen if a NATO member claimed Article 5 protection, but was turned down by the NATO council.

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Biden offered little hope that Putin could be taken at his word, and said the U.S. and Europe must stand together to support cash-strapped Ukraine.

“President Putin continues to call for new peace plans as his troops roll through the Ukrainian countryside and he absolutely ignores every agreement that his country has signed in the past and he has signed recently,” Biden said. “We, the United States, and Europe as a whole, have to stand with Ukraine at this moment. Ukraine needs our financial assistance and support as it pursues reforms and even in the face, in the face of this military onslaught.”

Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine, the rebels reached an agreement Friday with government forces on a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from the epicenter of fighting on Friday. Rebel leaders said the agreement would allow the evacuation of civilians from Debaltseve, a key railway hub that has become the focus of fighting in recent weeks because of its strategic location. It wasn’t immediately clear where the evacuees would go.

The cease-fire around Debaltseve held Friday as a convoy of several dozen buses drove from nearby Vuhelhirsk toward Debaltsevo, where a shrinking population has been trapped in cross-fire and left without power, heating and running water for almost two weeks. Halfway to Debaltsevo, the convoy’s movement was stopped by concrete blocks, apparently intended to block military vehicles from using the road.

Merkel and Hollande are set to hold talks with Putin in the Kremlin a day after discussing their proposals with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. In a sign of the importance of the initiative, this will be Merkel’s first trip to Moscow since Ukraine’s conflict broke out last year.

The fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russia-backed separatist rebels and Ukrainian forces has intensified sharply over the past two weeks. Russia vehemently denies that it is backing the insurgency with troops and weapons, but U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry rejected that denial on Thursday’s visit to Kiev.

Flight MH17 and the RUSSIAN sa-11 Buk

The tragic destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was a sadly predictable result of Russia supplying the powerful and long-ranged SA-11 “Buk” surface to air missile systems to separatists in eastern Ukraine who had no access to state air traffic control information.
The SA-11 system which was used to shoot down MH17 is a Russian-built, heavy anti-aircraft missile launcher coupled to a phased-array radar on a tracked chassis.

It is designed to engage military aircraft and missiles at altitudes of up to 72,000ft. It is in service with the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces, as well as other forces around the world.

In recent days, there have been multiple sightings of SA-11 systems in separatist hands near Donetsk reported on social media. This is close to where the airliner was shot down. On Monday 14 July, separatists shot down a Ukrainian Air Force An-26 military transport aircraft which was flying at above 22,000ft.

This incident signalled a significant rise in the anti-aircraft capabilities of the separatists since, up until this week, the only anti-aircraft missile systems seen in their possession were man-portable air defence systems (Manpads) such as SA-18 and SA-24 which are not capable of hitting aircraft flying above 19,500ft. As well as being incapable of engaging high-altitude targets, they are of limited use against the armoured Su-25 attack jets deployed by the Ukrainian Air Force.

After recent separatist defeats around Slavyansk, Russia evidently decided to supply their allies in eastern Ukraine with the much more powerful SA-11 system to check the advance of the Ukrainian anti-terror operation, which has been making heavy and increasing use of air power.

Almost certainly what occurred on Thursday was that separatists targeted what they assumed to be another An-26 transport flying at high altitude and shot it down using the same SA-11 systems employed earlier in the week. As the story broke, separatist social media accounts boasted of shooting down another An-26, only for these posts to be swiftly removes as it became clear an airliner was missing, and separatist leaders realised what they had actually hit.
system usually includes several launch vehicles and a command vehicle with a larger radar array, to coordinate the targeting of the launch vehicles. However, only the launch vehicles have been seen in eastern Ukraine. This means that the system used to bring down MH-17 was most likely being operated using the smaller integrated radar on the launch vehicle itself, and possibly by separatists unfamiliar with its specific functionalities.

Given that there seems to be little doubt that an SA-11 system was used to shoot down MH17, the question must now be who is responsible. Russian and separatist claims that the Ukrainian military is responsible are absurd. The Ukrainian military has absolutely no reason to have deployed their SA-11’s anywhere near Donetsk as the separatists do not use aircraft and shooting down a Russian aircraft violating its airspace is that last thing that Kiev wants.

Given the strength of reaction from Moscow over a single artillery shell which landed on the Russian side of the border last week, and the fears over direct Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian forces are being extremely careful to avoid actions which could give a pretext for Russian retaliation. However, the separatists have been shooting down aircraft over eastern Ukraine for weeks using surface to air missiles.

This is simply a tragic case of incorrect target selection by separatists using a weapons system which was much more powerful than previously seen in the conflict, and capable of reaching MH-17 and 33,000ft.

Unlike state operators of the system who are linked to national air traffic control networks, the separatists in Donetsk had no information about international flights and probably did not consider the possibility.

This is exactly why the international community has up to now been very careful to avoid non-state actors acquiring advanced anti-aircraft missile systems such as the SA-11 which Russia supplied to its proxies in Donetsk this week.