The director of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said Friday that Russia was trying to convince Ukraine to divert soldiers from the combat zone in the southeast with a flurry of military activity to the north in Belarus, dismissing the activity as routine maneuvers or feints intended to confuse.
“These are all elements of disinformation campaigns,” he said.
In a wide-ranging interview on the state of the war in Ukraine, the military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, also spoke about Russian efforts to encourage Iran to continue to supply its forces with drones and missiles, as well as Moscow’s apparently senseless obsession with conquering the city of Bakhmut, which has little strategic value.
He made his assertions about Russian activity in Belarus and Iran, which could not be independently verified, as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, made a triumphant return from Washington.
While the threat of a renewed Russian invasion from Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus is not imminent, Budanov said, it still cannot be ruled out. “It would be wrong to discount this possibility,” he added, “but also wrong to say we have any data confirming it exists.”
Yet, longer-term risks linger, Budanov acknowledged, and other Ukrainian officials had pointed out in a series of interviews earlier this month the risk of an escalation during the winter months. But Budanov’s comments were the most concrete yet in specifying that no intelligence now points to an imminent threat from Belarus.
None of the Russian troops are arrayed in assault formations, he said. Training camps for Russian soldiers are filled with newly mobilized civilians who, after completing training, are sent to fight in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. The training sites lack sufficient armored vehicles in mechanically working order to stage an attack, he said.
Russia’s military has tried to raise alarms in the Ukrainian army by loading soldiers on trains that chug toward Belarus’ border with Ukraine, he said.
In the southeast in the Donbas region, Budanov said, the political ambitions of the leader of a Russian mercenary army called the Wagner Group have partly dictated strategy on the Russian side.
The group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin insider, has made a crusade of capturing the city of Bakhmut to upstage rival commanders in the Russian regular army, Budanov said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times