Russia transferred 9,000 troops to Crimea in 2014

The Russian Federation deployed 9,000 military personnel to Crimea by means of air transport at the beginning of the Crimean crisis in March 2014, said the country’s permanent representative to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, in an interview with Deutsche Welle on Wednesday, May 18.

Deploying these “additional reinforcements” was legal, said the ambassador, citing the Russian-Ukrainian Bilateral treaty of 1997 that granted Russia the right to a military presence of 25,000 military personnel across Crimea, including in the city of Sevastopol—a major naval base. When the current crisis erupted, Russia had only 16,000 troops in Crimea and opted to fill this “gap” in spring of 2014, he clarified.

The ambassador also stated that there are no active Russian troops in the Donbass.

Deutsche Welle interviewer Tim Seastian reminded Chizhov of the arrest of Russian nationals Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Yevgeniy Yerofeyev in Ukraine in May. The men initially presented themselves as a sergeant of the Russian army and a captain of the country’s Main Intelligence Directorate, but subsequently retracted their words. The ambassador, in turn, maintained that the Aleksandrov and Yerofeyev were not active in the Russian military at the time of their arrest.

“You know, it’s difficult to prove things with evidence that gets lost and [when] a lawyer for one of those two gets killed in Ukraine,” said Chizhov.

Though Moscow previously denied that its troops were present on the Crimean Peninsula at the time of the referendum, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared during a live conference in April 2014 that the Russian military formed the buttress of Crimea’s defense forces.