By Roland Oliphant, Moscow
A soldier stands guard near a tank position close to the Russian border near the Ukranian.
Kiev blames Russian forces for downing of Ukrainian plane, and Moscow warns of 'irreversible consequences' over shelling amid reported troop buildup at frontier
Russia and Ukraine lurch closer toward open warfare on Monday as both countries accused each other of lethal cross-border attacks including the downing of a Ukrainian plane, and Moscow appeared to resume a build up of troops on its south-western frontier.
The Russian government warned Ukraine could face “irreversible consequences” in response to cross border shelling that killed one person on Sunday, but backed off from reports that it was considering “retaliatory precision strikes” in what would be the first conventional Russian intervention in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Sunday’s shelling, which struck a residential house just across the Russian border, was the latest of several incidents of cross-border fire in areas where Ukrainian forces are struggling to win back control of crossings seized by pro-Russian rebels. Kiev has blamed the latest incident on rebel fighters trying to draw Russia into the war.
In comments made in to Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, a Kremlin official said Moscow was considering striking back against Ukrainian forces in limited, “answering strikes”. “We know exactly where the firing is coming from,” the Kremlin source told the paper. The official said any such response would be restricted to hitting the source of cross-border fire, and would not constitute large-scale military intervention.
Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, later told AFP the report was “nonsense.” Moscow said that as a gesture of “goodwill”, it was inviting monitors from the OSCE European security and rights body to visit checkpoints along its frontier with Ukraine.
Kiev military officials have warned of increasing activity on the border, and on Monday said the downing of an airforce plane over the Luhansk region was likely the work of sophisticated forces operating from the Russian side.
One of numerous Images of Russian tanks and other military hardware entering Ukraine.
The An-26 plane was brought down by a missile near the Russian border southeast of Luhansk, the scene of heavy fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists, on Monday.
Colonel General Valery Heletey, Ukraine’s defence minister, was quoted on the presidential website saying that at 6,500 metres the aircraft was too high to be downed by weapons available to the separatists.
“So the plane was brought down by another more powerful rocket weapon which was fired, probably, from the territory of the Russian Federation,” he was quoted as saying.
The incident comes after the Ukrainian security council said Russian forces infiltrated three kilometres across the border on Saturday night, sparking renewed concerns about invasion.
Ukraine also said it destroyed a small column of armoured vehicles after it crossed the border late on Sunday night.
The report has not been independently confirmed, but NATO said on Monday that Russia has resumed a build up of troops on its border with Ukraine.
The war of words between Moscow and Kiev also heated up, with Kiev officials accusing the Kremlin of adopting Nazi propaganda tactics after Russian television report that claimed Ukrainian troops crucified a child.
The report on Russia’s state-owned Channel 1 included an interview with a woman in the Ukrainian city of Slavyansk giving a graphic description of the execution of a 3-year old. The incident has not been corroborated by any other media.
Natalya Stativko, an interior ministry spokeswoman, said the report followed “in the footsteps of Goebbels”.
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