Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Viktor Muzhenko said: “We never thought that Russia could act so treacherously and send its troops into the territory of Ukraine without declaring war. This is contrary to the international humanitarian law of war."
Not only Ukrainian media, but foreign ones such as "The Guardian" talked with the survivors of the cauldron, who confidently asserted that it was Russian soldiers who were shooting at them. True, no one gave the parameters by which one can determine that a soldier of the Russian army is firing at you. As a result, on August 28, Petro Poroshenko made a gesture, accusing Russia of the invasion and canceling his visit to Turkey in this regard. Three or four days earlier, the first arrests of Russian contract servicemen began. So, on August 25, ten soldiers of the 331st regiment of the 98-1 Svir division of the RF Armed Forces (military unit 71211) were detained in the Amvrosievsky district of the Donetsk region. This was the reason for the accusation of Russia that its regular military personnel "criminally broke into the territory of Ukraine." According to the SBU, the paratroopers were detained 20 km from the border with Russia. The detainees, according to the Ukrainian special services, had both documents and weapons, which turned out to be just an ideal gift for the propaganda of the neighboring state. However, the testimony of the detainees spoke of a completely different picture of what had happened. On August 23, their battalion was transferred to the Rostov region, and at night all personnel were alerted and sent on a march along the border with Ukraine. Many parts of the Russian-Ukrainian border are practically unmarked (at least in 2014): here it is possible to enter the territory of the brotherly state during the daytime, not to mention the dark. As a result, BMD with paratroopers lagged behind the main column and crossed the border. Moreover, the car came under artillery fire, the driver was wounded, and the paratroopers decided to go back. But then the border guards of Ukraine appeared, helped the wounded and detained him until August 31 - on that day the fighters were returned to Russia.
Another "fact" of the undoubted presence of the armed formations of the Russian army was the arrest on August 27 of soldier Pyotr Khokhlov. He assured the SBU investigators that he was a serviceman of the 9th separate motorized rifle brigade from Nizhny Novgorod, which was located in the Rostov region in August 2014. Formally, Khokhlov is generally a deserter, since together with Ruslan Garafulin, on August 8, they voluntarily left the location of the unit in the hope of going over to the side of the Donbass militia. The fighters are said to have coveted the mythical "reward" given by the militia. According to The New York Times Magazin, on September 21, 2014, Khokhlov was exchanged as part of an exchange of prisoners of war in the DPR.
And already quite paradoxical, if not scandalous, looks like the statement of the Minister of Defense of Ukraine Danilyuk that “in Ilovaisk the ATO forces stopped the“Russian aggressor”. The forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine barely managed to leave Ilovaisk, and here we are talking about stopping the units of the Russian army.
Further - more: the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Muzhenko officially declares on August 25-26 that regular Russian troops are already fighting near Ilovaisk, who are not even shy about wearing military insignia. However, as always, such statements were not supported by any weighty evidence.
This is how the Russian "invasion" is seen in the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Part 1
The next wave of disinformation came a year later. On August 5, 2015, when the SBU announced at once about 3,500 soldiers of the Russian army who took part in the hostilities near Ilovaisk. And the military prosecutor's office of Ukraine even counted military equipment - 60 tanks, 320 units of light armored vehicles and 60 guns. For some reason, there was no question of MLRS. When scientists from the Central Scientific Research Institute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine took up the analysis (there is one), it turned out that the SBU did not know how to count, and at least 4 thousand Russian soldiers fought in Ilovaisk. On October 19, 2015, the Armed Forces of Ukraine published a report that that the decisive importance in the battle for Ilovaisk was played by artillery, which hit the positions of the 5th battalion of territorial defense. Allegedly, Russian artillerymen fired on the Terbats from their side of the border, which caused a panic flight of the battalion immediately to the Ivano-Frankivsk region. As a result, the front flank was exposed, and everything went to dust.
“The Russian military crossed the border near the border settlements of Novoaleksandrovsky and Avilo-Uspenka (RF) and Berestovo and Kuznetsovo-Mikhailovka (Ukraine). Not meeting any resistance on their way, the invaders advanced to the line: Leninskoe - Olginskys - Novoivanovka - Kumachevo."
This is how they describe the reasons for their defeat of the Armed Forces of Ukraine a year later. At the same time, they even drew visual maps illustrating the chronology of hostilities.
This is how the Russian "invasion" is seen in the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Part 2
While calculating Russian armored vehicles and personnel on the territory of Ilovaisk, specialists from the Ministry of Defense and the Military Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine cannot come to a consensus regarding their own losses in this boiler. In April 2015, the number of 459 killed and about 180 missing were announced. But at the end of the summer of the same year, Anatoly Matias, the chief military prosecutor, announced 366 killed, 429 wounded, 128 captured and 158 missing.
In addition, there is a "dissenting opinion" of the ATO, in which the chief of staff Nazarov mentions the desertion of thousands of fighters, about which they were deliberately silent at first, so as not to shock the public. The ATO also believes that for the entire time of the Ilovaisk battle, the militia suffered irreparable losses of more than 300 people, and 220 were wounded. At the same time, the "Russian limited contingent" lost 150 soldiers. The chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Muzhenko still considers the presence of regular forces of the Russian army to be the main reason for the failure of the operation.
At the same time, it is still not known in detail what happened at the ATO headquarters and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the days when the group of forces was surrounded near Ilovaisk. From 25 to 27 August, General Khomchak demanded from the ATO headquarters a decision to release the encircled, but in vain. It was proposed to either strengthen the front and rescue the encircled by storm, at the same time capturing the city, or to leave the cauldron without weapons. But the blocked troops received only: "Hold on and wait for help." At the same time, there was disinformation for the relatives of the fighters from the presidential administration and the General Staff about the imminent breakthrough of the encirclement and the return of the soldiers. But until August 28, no command was received to withdraw the troops from the encirclement.
Of course, no one excludes the presence of Russian citizens in the militia (as, by the way, in the enemy's camp), but neither the ATO headquarters, nor the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, nor the military prosecutor's office of Ukraine have yet provided clear documentary evidence of the presence of regular military units of the Russian army on Donbass. And unfounded accusations and statistical calculations can only justify the consequences of the catastrophe in which the Ukrainian army fell near Ilovaisk. But such a cauldron was far from the first and not the last on the map of military operations in the South-East of Ukraine.
