US troops in live ammunition exercises near Russian border as payback for Ukraine aggression
Channel: news all the world
Date: 2014-04-23

SIX hundred US troops are headed for Poland and the three Baltic countries for live-ammunition infantry exercises with armed forces from the four former Soviet-bloc nations.
Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the dispatch of troops from US bases in Italy and Germany for military manoeuvres near Russia's western border is in response to its aggression in Ukraine.
"If there's a message to Moscow, it is the exact same message (as delivered before), that we take our obligations very, very seriously," Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon.
The American troops will be in Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania and more American forces could be sent to other NATO nations in the future, Kirby said.
"These exercises were conceived and added to the (regular) exercise regime as a result of what's going on in Ukraine," Kirby said.
He said the first 600 troops, which will be drawn from the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) headquartered in Italy, will conduct month-long exercises with about 150 airborne soldiers assigned to each of the four countries. That first group will be replaced in a month by a similar-sized contingent divided among the four nations, with subsequent rotations planned each month for the rest of the year.
"What we're after here is a persistent presence — a persistent rotational presence in these exercises," Kirby said.Meanwhile, US Vice President Joe Biden met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Ukrainian legislators on Tuesday during a visit to the capital Kiev.
"The road ahead is difficult," Biden said at a joint press conference with Yatsenyuk. "But you will not walk this road alone. We will walk it with you."
Biden called on Russia to pull back thousands of troops massed on the Ukrainian border and to "stop supporting men in masks in unmarked uniforms" who have seized buildings in eastern Ukraine.
"No nation has the right to simply grab land from another nation," he said. "No nation has that right. And we will never recognise Russia's illegal occupation of Crimea, and neither will the world."
The White House announced $8 million in nonlethal assistance to Ukrainian armed forces and border guards, plus $50 million for voter education and election oversight programs, governance advisers and energy security experts.Ukraine's acting president Oleksandr Turchynov has also ordered the military to resume an operation against pro-Kremlin separatists, after they "brutally tortured" bodies of two people, including a kidnapped local councillor.
"I demand the resumption of effective counterterrorism measures to protect Ukrainian citizens in the east from terrorism," he said.
Mr Turchynov had earlier declared that the rebels' refusal to comply with an accord agreed last week by Kiev, Moscow and the West "puts a cross" through it.
He said the bodies of two people were found in the rebel-held town of Slavyansk on Tuesday, both bearing signs of torture.
One of them, he said, was that of Volodymyr Rybak, a councillor in the town of Gorlivka, "who was kidnapped recently by the terrorists".
Rybak was a local member of the pro-Western party led by Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who is a leading candidate in a presidential election to be held in Ukraine May 25.
Mr Turchynov is a member of the same party.