No significant uptick in east Ukraine fighting despite rising tensions - military spokesman

Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said on August 12 that "the cease-fire has not been observed by the illegal armed groups, but the average number of shelling incidents is pretty much at the same level," Radio Liberty notes. On the same day, however, Kyiv accused Russia of planning to provoke further violence in eastern Ukraine and of bolstering Russia-backed separatist military forces in the region with fresh deliveries of ammunition and military hardware. Ukraine’s military intelligence service said that Russia was planning "large-scale provocative actions through the contact line in Ukraine's east and then will accuse Ukraine of not complying" with a peace plan under the 2015 Minsk accords. Kyiv has put its forces on the highest alert level in both eastern Ukraine and along the administrative border between Ukraine’s mainland and the Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula. The Foreign Ministry in Kyiv on August 12 asked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to push for its monitors to be given access to Crimea and eastern Ukraine’s separatist-controlled border areas with Russia. These moves come amid heightened worries in Ukraine that Russia may be planning to ramp up fighting in the war between Kyiv and Russia-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine after Moscow accused Kyiv this week of trying to provoke a conflict over Crimea. On August 11, Russia announced naval war games in the Black Sea and Ukraine put its troops on combat alert, as the United States called on both sides to show restraint.  Moscow made the announcement one day after it claimed to have thwarted an incursion into Russian-held Crimea by Ukrainian saboteurs in which two members of Russia's security forces died.  Russia's lead security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), said it had detained several men - both Ukrainian and Russian citizens - and confiscated weapons in the alleged incursion. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Russia's claim of an incursion preposterous and a pretext for Moscow to make more military threats. Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014 after deploying troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by Kyiv, Western governments, and a total of 100 countries.