The hidden invasion: Russia’s military convoys to Ukraine since 2014

Later the OSCE SMM wrote on their Twitter that on 10 October “In a non-government controlled area of Donetsk region near the border with the Russian Federation, an SMM UAV again spotted convoys of trucks along a dirt road where there is no border crossing facility in the middle of the night. One of the trucks carried an anti-aircraft gun.”

Between 22:20 and 01:40 on the night of 11-12 October, the drone spotted more vehicles in the area, including a truck carrying an armored personnel carrier, entering and exiting Ukraine via the same unpaved track.

At around 23:00 on 16 October, the SMM long-range UAV spotted a truck and a car on the same road moving towards the border with Russia until they reached a parking area in a field. Later the group of at least 12 people walked from the border to the parked truck and some of them embussed in it.

About 00:20 on 17 October, the drone recorded three more trucks, separately moving from the border down the same track southwestwards.

At 01:36 on 27 October, the SMM’s drone spotted another convoy of seven trucks on the same dirt road driving in a south-westerly direction towards Manych i.e. moving from Russia. After the UAV was re-directed to continue observing the convoy, the SMM lost all communications with the aircraft at 01:53.

“For about 35 minutes before communications were lost, the UAV had experienced signal interference, assessed as jamming… The UAV did not return to its ground control station near Stepanivka… and is considered lost,” the report reads.

Between 7 August 2018 and 27 October, the SMM observed military convoys on seven occasions on the same unpaved road near occupied Manych, which directly leads to the Russian border.

Since the demarcation of the Russia-Ukraine state border was agreed but didn’t occur before the war, many dirt tracks in the region remained accessible for smugglers for years. Later, the roads bypassing the official crossing points became useful for the Russian invasion and further military supply missions. As the OSCE footage shows, the Russian military still uses the uncontrolled roads, avoiding any attention by the civilians who cross the border, as well as evading the checks of the Russian border service, which is a structural part of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

The military covered trucks spotted by the OSCE can be used to transport manpower or ammunition. What the OSCE describes looks like rotations of the troops. Nevertheless, the trucks could carry munitions as well.

The first convoys

Crimea

In late February – early March 2014 multiple Russian military convoys invaded Crimea. Most of them ferried the Kerch Strait, some of them left the Russian Black Sea Fleet Base in Sevastopol where manpower was concentrated in advance.

A picture of military equipment loaded on the ferry “Nikolai Akseyonenko” found in an online album by driver of the 1st detachment of the first squad of the 1st automobile platoon of the automobile company (for ammunition supply) Usman Gadaev.

Russian military convoy without license plates or any marking on its way from the East-Crimean city of Feodosiya to the regional capital of Simferopol. March 2014. Photograph: independent.co.uk

The Russian Army captures a Ukrainian military base in Crimea. CC BY-SA 3.0 Anton Goloborodko.

At first, Putin claimed there were the “little green men” in Crimea, not the Russian military, as he admitted a year later. Russian special services troops besieging a Ukrainian military base in Crimea, February 2014. (Image: UNIAN)

Unmarked trucks with Putin’s so-called “little green men” – heavily-armed Russian cadres military troops hiding their identities and without insignia during the invasion into the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in February 2014.

The Russian military blockaded all Ukrainian key military and government facilities in the peninsula. Supported by many local officials and law enforcers, the Russian military regulars effectively suppressed any chance of Ukrainian civil or military resisting and facilitated the sham plebiscite and further annexation of Crimea by Russia, which finished the Russian military operation.

Donbas

On 12 April 2014, a group of 52 commandos captured the city police building in Sloviansk and seized its firearms arsenal. The group arrived in full gear armed with AK-74 assault rifles, they were led by Igor Girkin from occupied Crimea where they had undergone training and operational coordination. On their way from Crimea, they crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border into Donetsk or Luhansk Oblast and traveled more than 200km inland up to Sloviansk where they joined 150-200 pro-Russian local “supporters of federalization of Ukraine,” as pro-Russian separatists were called then, who later participated in seizing the police station and later in capturing the nearby city of Kramatorsk. Girkin’s group can be considered the first known Russian manpower convoy which illegally crossed the eastern border of Ukraine.

Another Russian convoy of armed paramilitaries arrived in the Donbas on 3 May 2014, as the military trucks full of Don Cossacks crossed the border and entered the city of Antratsyt. They captured local government buildings with the full support of local officials.

In May and later on in 2014, Russia concentrated its troops along the Ukrainian eastern border covering the deployments as military games. Multiple transborder artillery attacks on Ukrainian troops took place during the summer as Ukraine was attempting to take control of its border. Invasions of Russian regulars and Russian-trained locals occurred following the barrages as Russia disrupted Ukrainian plans to regain control the border, in order to cut the foreign supplies and to circle the uncontrolled cities forcing the armed groups to surrender.

Types of convoys