President Biden has on Friday at the United States White House shown intelligence that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had made a final decision to invade Ukraine.
“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to, intend to, attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days,” Mr. Biden said in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. “We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”
Asked whether he thought that Mr. Putin was still wavering, Mr. Biden said, “I’m convinced he’s made the decision.” Later he added that his impression of Mr. Putin’s intentions was based on U.S. intelligence.
Mr. Putin had made a final decision to follow through with his threat of an invasion of Ukraine.
Still, Mr. Biden implored Russia to “choose diplomacy.”
“It is not too late to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table,” Mr. Biden said, referring to planned talks between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister next week. “If Russia takes military action before that day, it will be clear that they have slammed the door shut on diplomacy.”
The president spoke after holding another round of virtual talks with European leaders on Friday afternoon.
Mr. Biden’s remarks follow a new assessment by American officials based in Europe that Russia has as many as 190,000 troops massed at the Ukrainian border and inside two pro-Moscow separatist regions, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Mr. Putin insisted on Friday that he was prepared for further diplomacy. But Russian officials said the country’s military would conduct drills over the weekend that would include the launch of ballistic and cruise missiles.
The prospect of testing the country’s nuclear forces added to the sense of foreboding in the region.
“We are ready to go on the negotiating track under the condition that all questions will be considered together, without being separated from Russia’s main proposals,” Mr. Putin said at a news conference.
The head of Ukraine’s ministry of defense said the claim an attack was imminent was false, a ploy designed to inflame tensions and offer a pretext for Russia to invade. He made a direct appeal to people living in the region, telling them they were fellow Ukrainians and were under no threat from Kyiv.
The United States and its NATO allies have warned for days that Russia might use false reports out of eastern Ukraine about violence threatening ethnic Russians living there to justify an attack. The hyperbolic warnings from the separatists — who offered no proof of imminent danger — were greeted with a sense of urgency by the Ukrainian government.
The defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, urged Ukrainians in the separatist-held territories to ignore Russian propaganda that the Ukrainian government was going to attack them. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Ukraine is not your enemy.”
But Denis Pushilin, the pro-Moscow leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a secessionist state in Ukrainian territory, offered a starkly different version of what might be coming.
Comments
Post a Comment