Satellite images show that Russia has recently built a new military base in Crimea, according to a report.
US allies accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of secretly gathering troops – for unknown reasons – amid fears of invasion, the Daily Mail reported.
The images show lines of military vehicles and troop tents in Crimea, a Russian-speaking peninsula south of mainland Ukraine that Putin annexed after a 2014 referendum.
An April 13 image, taken by PlanetLabs and published by the Daily Mail, shows “at least 1,000 vehicles” and a substantial number of tents for infantry troops, the newspaper reported.
“It is Russia’s largest military deployment on Ukraine’s borders,” EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said on Monday.
The new images come after President Biden offered Putin a summer summit in Europe last week without preconditions. Biden appeared to be blinking this month about the decision to send warships to the Black Sea because of Russian aggression in Ukraine. The Pentagon has ordered a return of two American destroyers.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has supported pro-Russian insurgents in neighboring republics – including the support of separatist allies in Georgia and Moldova.
Putin presided over the annexation of Crimea almost a decade ago, without Ukraine’s consent, in a rare current change of the border by force.
The deployment of Russian troops is often murky, but it is believed that Putin’s government deployed troops to Crimea to facilitate the 2014 annexation and secretly supported a pair of separatist provinces in the eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
In Ukraine, a large number of people speak Russian rather than Ukrainian, and the country’s politics alternated between pro-Western and pro-Russian until the 2014 protests that ousted pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych. His removal sparked pro-Russian protests in southern and eastern Ukraine.