Satellite images show that Russia recently built a new military base in Crimea, according to a report.
U.S. allies accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of secretly gathering troops – for unknown reasons – amid fears of an invasion, the Daily Mail reported.
The images show lines of military vehicles and troop shops in Crimea, a Russian-speaking peninsula in southern 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 considerable number of tents for infantry troops, the newspaper reported.
“It is the highest Russian military deployment on Ukraine’s borders,” European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday.
The new images come after President Biden last week offered Putin an unconditional summer summit in Europe. Biden seemed to be blinking this month over the decision to send warships to the Black Sea over Russian aggression in Ukraine. The Pentagon ordered a change of direction by two American destroyers.
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has supported pro-Russian insurgents in neighboring republics, including the strengthening of the allied states of Georgia and Moldova.
Putin presided over the annexation of Crimea almost a decade ago without Ukraine’s consent to a rare current border change by force.
Deployments of Russian troops are often murky, but it is believed that Putin’s government has deployed troops to Crimea to facilitate the annexation of 2014 and has secretly supported a couple of separatist provinces in the Donbas region, in the is from Ukraine.
In Ukraine, a large number of people speak more Russian than Ukrainian and the country’s policy alternated between pro-Western and pro-Russian until the 2014 protests that ousted pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych. His expulsion sparked pro-Russian protests in southern and eastern Ukraine.