About 500 yards away from Russian-backed separatists, a group of Ukrainian soldiers waits for a fight it’s sure is coming. And the men are strangely relaxed about it all, according to photographer Timothy Fadek, who spent time with the soldiers Friday on the front lines in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region.
“They have embraced the inevitability,” Fadek said. “I was talking to one of the soldiers and he said: ‘It’s inevitable. We’ve accepted this inevitability of an attack.’ And then there was a little bit of an argument between two soldiers. One said, ‘The Russians will not come across the border, they will attack from the sea,’ meaning the Sea of Azov.
Another soldier disagreed with both those assessments and said, ‘No, the attack will come from Belarus.’ “But while they might not agree with where an attack will come from, they are all 100% convinced it is going to happen.
Commander Andriy, a 22-year veteran of Ukraine’s armed forces, is worried. He believes there’s a very real chance that Putin will order his forces to invade once again. This winter, Russia has massed as many as 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s border. It has also tested its new hypersonic missiles, which may be capable of evading American air defense systems.
Some analysts believe a full Russian ground invasion, with tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles rolling over the border, would only be possible after the ground here freezes solid, but in the trenches, troops told CBS News they believe it could happen any time.
Meanwhile, Germany has blocked NATO ally Estonia from offering military support to Ukraine by refusing to offer export permits for weapons of German origin as it faces a possible Russian invasion, a news report has claimed.
Unlike other NATO members, including the US and UK, Germany has refused to provide weapons to Ukraine amid tensions with Russia. The news report claimed that Berlin has also declined to allow a third country to send weapons to Ukraine because the weaponry originated in Germany, according to Estonian and German officials.
