Russia's unprecedented military buildup: Satellite images reveal stark picture

Russia's build-up of military personnel threatening Ukraine probably totals up to 190,000, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in a statement to an OSCE meeting on the Ukraine crisis on Friday.

"We assess that Russia probably has massed between 169,000-190,000 personnel in and near Ukraine as compared with about 100,000 on January 30," Michael Carpenter told the meeting, which Russia did not attend.

"This is the most significant military mobilization in Europe since the Second World War."

Meanwhile, Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine said on Friday they planned to evacuate around 700,000 people to Russia from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).

Most DPR residents are Russian speakers and many have already been granted Russian citizenship.

Ukraine says the people who run the DPR are not separatists but Russian proxies, something the Kremlin denies.

A Russian overthrow of the Ukrainian government through a combination of conventional and irregular means would be a seminal event in international politics, with far-reaching implications that go well beyond Ukraine. A Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine in coordination with Russian-backed separatists, short of a full-scale invasion, would also be a serious concern.

A Russian invasion could also place Russian forces close to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), such as Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.

The new U.S. estimate of up to 190,000 includes the Russian-backed separatists inside Ukraine, the Russian National Guard and Russian troops in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. These forces were not counted in previous assessments of troops deployed near Ukraine’s borders and in neighbouring Belarus.

As further indication that the Russians are preparing for a potential invasion, a U.S. defence official said an estimated 40% to 50% of the ground forces deployed in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border have moved into attack positions nearer the border. The defence official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. military assessments.

The official also said the number of Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups deployed in the border area had grown to as many as 125, up from 83 two weeks ago. Each battalion tactical group has 750 to 1,000 soldiers.

OSINT – A GAME-CHANGER?

Since the start of the cold war, America and its NATO allies have scrutinised Russian military deployments and movements using expensive and often exotic means of keeping tabs on other people’s territory such as spy satellites and surveillance flights as well as human agents—means that nobody else could muster.

But civilian observers increasingly have their own tools. Journalists, academics, think-tankers, activists and amateur enthusiasts have access to a range of open-source intelligence, or OSINT, capabilities that have expanded hugely over the past decade, and that let them reach their own conclusions about what the world’s armed forces are doing.

Images and other data from commercial satellites, videos posted on social media, ship- and aircraft-tracking websites and other publicly available, if sometimes arcane, sources can reveal goings on in inaccessible places like Rechitsa in unprecedented detail, and sometimes nearly in real time. Russia’s military build-up on the borders of Ukraine is a coming-out party for the possibilities OSINT now offers.

In recent days, the Russian army has moved equipment around at a frenzied pace, possibly to give the appearance of a withdrawal—something which the defence ministry said was under way on February 14th. Michael Kofman of CNA, an American think-tank, calls it a “deployment shell game” in which units are shuffled around confusingly “without altering the overall picture”. Some troops are leaving Crimea, he says, but more are arriving in other places along the border.