President Vladimir Putin's armed forces deployed thousands of troops to a Russian border town in anticipation of a Ukrainian offensive, it was reported Monday.
New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief Anton Troianovski reported that Ukrainian military officials said the Russian army had deployed 19 battalion tactical groups — each with as many as 1,000 troops — to Belgorod "in preparation for an assault to slow a Ukrainian counteroffensive around Kharkiv."
Belgorod is a city located on the Seversky Donets River, about 25 miles north of Russia’s border with Ukraine and the Donbas region.
Ukrainian troops, armed with heavy weapons supplied by the West, were fighting Russian forces along a 300-mile front in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the Times said. After weeks of intense combat, Russia had made only sporadic gains.
Dmitry Polyansky, the Kremlin's first deputy permanent representative to the U.N., said that Ukraine was planning a strike against Russia, Lenta.ru reported.
Polyansky told Britain’s Sky News that state-owned RIA Novosti said Ukraine's plans had been confirmed by documents found during the special operation, teleSUR reported.
"Documents that we discovered at the beginning of our special military operation indicate with all clarity that there were concrete plans to strike on Russia from Ukraine," Polyansky told Sky News.
"There were also concrete plans to strike on Donbas and the documents of [the] Ukrain[ian] General Staff indicate this. So, this was kind of a preemptive strike from Russia and we did it with the full conformity of Article 5 of the UN charter and we notified the UN about it."
Polyansky added that Russia was in a "proxy war" against NATO.
"It is obvious right now that we are having a proxy war with NATO, so NATO is waging a proxy war with Russia, not vice versa," he told Sky News. "This is the reality that we face."
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s state Duma — lower house of the Federal Assembly — said NATO had been preparing Ukraine for an attack on Russia. He accused the U.S. of deciding to supply of weapons to Ukraine even before the start of the war.
"This is a battle between good and evil," Volodin said, Lenta.ru reported.