The Russian Army has begun building a tactical bridge and a new road across the important Pripyat River in southern Belarus. Commercial satellite images uploaded on social media on February 16 claimed to show a military-style pontoon bridge at the Pripyat River, just 4 miles from the Ukrainian border and 14 miles northwest of the number 4 nuclear reactor, which notoriously melted down in the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
“There’s what Russia says. And then there’s what Russia does. And we haven’t seen any pullback of its forces,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview. “We continue to see critical units moving toward the border, not away from the border,” he told MSNBC. Russia earlier published videos claiming that columns of tanks and military vehicles were returning to their permanent bases.
At a forward location called Zyabrovka in Belarus, although the ground troops seem to have departed, a new formation of attack helicopters was seen on satellite imagery on February 15. The new attack helicopter unit seen at Zyabrovka airfield consists of at least 18 helicopters, possibly including the Mi-8 and Ka-52 helicopters. While ground troops seem to have moved from a few locations, there is hardly any evidence to prove that those are backward movements.
The US on Thursday warned that Russia had added as many as 7,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders despite claims of withdrawal. Earlier estimates suggested that Russia had gathered more than 150,000 troops in the east, north and south of Ukraine.