Russia Could Invade Ukraine within Days
Escalating military preparations by Russia and its separatist allies in Ukraine indicate that an attack could come within days, American officials say.
U.S. warned on Friday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could mount a major military assault on Ukraine at any moment, suggesting a crisis that had been building for months has reached a critical phase.
Ukraine warned that drills by Russia and Russian-backed separatists had left the country all but encircled and its ports effectively blockaded, the latest evidence of a shift in tone after weeks in which Ukraine’s leaders had downplayed the threat of an attack.
The Pentagon, which has ruled out deploying troops to defend Ukraine, sent 3,000 soldiers to neighboring Poland on Friday as tensions mounted, reinforcing the U.S. military personnel being dispatched to help NATO allies. A host of countries, fearing an imminent invasion, told their citizens to leave Ukraine. And President Biden spent more than an hour on a call with allies to discuss “diplomacy and deterrence,” the White House said.
With the United States pushing for a diplomatic solution, Putin and Biden will speak by phone on Saturday, according to the Kremlin and a White House spokesman, and the Kremlin said Mr. Putin would also speak again with President Emmanuel Macron of France.
U.S. intelligence officials had initially thought Putin would wait until the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing later this month before deciding whether to go ahead with an offensive, to avoid antagonizing President Xi Jinping of China, a critical ally. In recent days, however, new intelligence and further Russian troop deployments prompted a change in their assessment. American officials said it was still unclear whether Mr. Putin had made a decision to invade.
U.S. officials have picked up intelligence that Russia is considering Wednesday as the possible date for the start of military action, according to multiple officials briefed on the material. Those officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, acknowledged the possibility that the mention of a particular date could be part of a Russian disinformation effort.
The combination of the Russian troop movements and the new intelligence prompted a cascade of public warnings by the United States and other countries — including the Netherlands, Latvia, Britain, Japan and even Russia — to any citizens remaining in Ukraine. Many others began evacuating embassy staff.
“The Russians are in a position to be able to mount a major military action in Ukraine any day now,” Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters at the White House on Friday, adding that an invasion could begin during the Olympics, which are scheduled to end on Feb. 20.
Russia has made a series of demands of the West, including scaling back the NATO military presence in Eastern Europe to 1990s levels and guaranteeing that Ukraine could never join NATO. (Mr. Putin has long been vehemently opposed to Ukraine, a former pillar of the Soviet Union, joining NATO, a position he last made forcefully clear when Russian forces reclaimed Crimea in 2014.) The United States has called those demands “non-starters’’ and instead offered a series of proposals aimed at arms control.
“We don’t know exactly what is going to happen,” Mr. Sullivan said, emphasizing the need for Americans to leave Ukraine now. “The risk is now high enough and the threat is now immediate enough that this is what prudence demands. If you stay, you are assuming risk with no guarantee that there will be any other opportunity to leave and no prospect of a U.S. military evacuation in the event of a Russian invasion.”
“What I do know about Putin is he likes uncertainty,” said Michael A. McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. “He has leveraged that in the past for advantage. He is forcing Biden’s hand and everybody else’s.”
Next week, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is scheduled to visit Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv and Moscow, fresh from a visit to Washington where he and Mr. Biden promised a “united” front on shutting down Nord Stream 2, a lucrative Germany-to-Russia gas pipeline project, should Russia invade Ukraine.
Russia’s foreign ministry dismissed American talk of war as mere propaganda.
“A coordinated information attack is being conducted against Moscow,” the ministry said in a statement, along with a list of previous Western warnings of a possible imminent invasion. That messaging, it said, is “aimed at undermining and discrediting Russia’s fair demands for security guarantees, as well as at justifying Western geopolitical aspirations and military absorption of Ukraine’s territory.”
Maria Zakharova, the ministry spokeswoman, wrote on the Telegram app: “The White House’s hysteria is as revealing as ever. The Anglo-Saxons need war. At any price.”
Mr. Sullivan disagreed with the idea that informing Americans of Russia’s military capabilities was the same as calling for a war. “We are trying to stop a war. Prevent war. To avert a war,” he told reporters.
