Around 20 trucks and five armored personnel carriers have crossed the border from Russia into the Sverdlovsk region of Luhansk, Ukraine, to bring in Russian and Chechen fighters to reinforce pro-Russia terrorists there, a report from Ukraine’s tsn.ua said on Tuesday.

Most Ukrainian forces that had been stationed in Sverdlovsk—on Ukraine’s border with Russia—had left earlier in the day to assist Ukrainian forces at the department of the border guard service, Deakovo. Their reassignment left the border in the Sverdlovsk region unprotected, according to the report.

Pro-Russia forces have made a previous attempt to establish a headquarters in Sverdlovsk. Locals in the area fear that this time around, with Ukrainian forces absent, they could succeed.

Parts of eastern Ukraine have been in turmoil since late last year after Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to pressure the country to turn its back on an association agreement with the European Union and instead join his Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s pro-Russia president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, agreed to follow Putin’s orders, but was chased from power in February after months of protests by Ukrainian citizens. Russia then annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and pro-Russia turmoil has engulfed parts of the nation’s east ever since.

So far, the only response to Russia’s aggression from the United States and EU has been issuing asset freezes and travel bans on a handful of Putin’s comrades. On the EU’s part, especially, the visible response seems embarrassingly weak. Behind the scenes, though, the Ukrainian crisis is fundamentally reshaping Europe.