Russia to adjust military strategy to reflect Ukraine crisis

A top Kremlin security adviser said threats to Russia from the situation in Ukraine and Nato enlargement in eastern Europe would be key factors as Moscow reviews its military strategy.

"The fact that the military infrastructure of Nato member states is getting closer to our borders, including via enlargement, will preserve its place as one of the external threats for the Russian Federation, " Mikhail Popov, the deputy head of the Kremlin advisory security council, said in an interview with RIA.

He named US missile defence plans and the situation in Ukraine as other dangers to Russia’s security.

Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko yesterday accused Russia of "direct and undisguised aggression" which he said had radically changed the battlefield balance as Kiev's forces suffered a further reverse in their war with pro-Moscow separatists.

In the latest in a string of setbacks in the past week, Ukraine’s military said it had pulled back from defending a vital airport in the east of the country, near the city of Luhansk, where troops had been battling a Russian tank battalion.

Mr Poroshenko said in a speech there would be high-level personnel changes in the Ukrainian armed forces, whose troops fled a new rebel advance in the south which Kiev and its Western allies say has been backed up by Russian armoured columns.

More than one million people have been displaced by the conflict, including 814,000 Ukrainians now in Russia with various forms of status, the UNHCR United Nations refugee agency said today.

Numbers displaced inside Ukraine by the fighting have nearly doubled in the past there weeks to at least 260,000 and more are fleeing, it earlier told a Geneva news briefing.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, who called on Sunday for immediate negotiations on the "statehood" of southern and eastern Ukraine, blamed Kiev's leadership for refusing to enter into direct political talks with the separatists.

European Union leaders decided at a summit on Saturday that the direct engagement of Russian troops in the war - still denied by the Kremlin - called for a stepping up of economic sanctions unless Moscow pulled its soldiers back.

With German Chancellor Angela Merkel stressing that accepting Russia's behaviour was not an option, EU ambassadors were to start discussing a new package of measures that could include a ban on Europeans buying Russian government bonds, EU sources said.

Until last week Ukraine had appeared close to crushing the four-month rebellion in the east, which erupted after a pro-Moscow president was forced out of power by popular protests. But then the rebels opened a new front to the south on the coast of the Sea of Azov, pushing towards the city of Mariupol.

Reuters