UKRAINE DEFENCES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 January 1939, Page 8

UKRAINE DEFENCES

STRONG FORTIFIED LINES BUILT BY RUSSIANS.

WIDE NO-MAN’S LAND ALONG FRONTIER.

Reliable reports that the Soviet Union is hastening construction of a vast artificial no-man’s-land along its western frontier as a first line of defence against Germany have reached diplomatic circles here, says a Washington message to the “New York Times.”

The information is that the Soviets, seeing the collapse of their efforts to forge an international barricade eastward around Germany, have virtually dropped everything else in order to protect the Ukrainian wheat and coal fields from any invasion.

A six-point programme designed to ]slow down and finally halt an approaching army has been dovetailed into the natural defences of distance and lack of communications. It is reported here to include: Deforestation of a belt ranging from a few to a hundred miles wide between the Soviet Union and her neighbours of Rumania, Poland, Latvia, and Estonia.

Depopulation of this zone, and in some cases resettlement of evacuated towns and farms with trusted Red Army men and women, ostensibly posing as peasants and workers, while guarding the frontiers and checking illegal entry. Destruction or mining of transportation arteries, including bridges, roads, and railroads, running through this buffer zone.

Construction of a formidable “Maginot Line” along the western boundary of this quarantine belt, into which reserve stores are being rushed and fortifications built.

Speeding up of railroad and highway building behind this line to, facilitate transfer of supplies and troops. Development back of this area of big military concentration centres, together with well-fortified and well-pro-visioned air bases. These would support the Russian Air Force, whose duty would be to harass the enemy not only throughout the buffer zone, but before it actually reached Soviet frontiers.

Soviet militarists and statesmen for years have spoken publicly of a plan to “meet our Fascist enemy on the soil whence he comes,” meaning beyond the Ukrainian borders. Washington reports are that the Bolsheviks also are extending their no-man’s-belt to . include Afghanistan, which also are being drawn into the general defence system. (The Soviet Government has already erected wide defences between Russian and Finland on the scale here described.) This Soviet defence strategy is in reality 20 years old. It was begun at the end of the World War, when German troops threatened Leningrad and the Russian capital hastily was transferred 500 miles inland to Moscow, where it has been kept. Subsequently the Bolsheviks transferred the capital of the Ukraine from Kiev, near the border, to Kharkov, several hundred miles inland. Now the capital of the Ukraine is again Kiev.