“Maybe it’s just me,” tweets Blake Hounshell, “but open warfare between Ukraine and Russia seems like a BFD.”
Yes indeed. As it happens, we’re not quite at the stage of open warfare yet, but we sure seem to be getting mighty close. Remember that Russian “aid convoy” that everyone was so suspicious of? Well, it turns out to be….pretty suspicious. BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg says that upon inspection, many of the 280 trucks turned out to be “almost empty.” Yesterday we received reports of a column of Russian military vehicles crossing the border into Ukraine as the aid convoy idled nearby, and that was confirmed by NATO earlier today. A little later, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that Ukraine had destroyed “the majority” of the column.
In one sense, this is nothing new. Ukraine has been saying for months that Moscow is backing pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, and more recently Ukraine began an aggressive fighting to expel them. Still, this does appear to be an escalation. Between the mysterious aid convoy and the military column that may or may not have been largely destroyed by Ukrainian forces, warfare is indeed becoming a little more open every day.
