Service members of the Ukrainian Air Assault Forces take part in tactical drills at a training ground in an unknown location in Ukraine, in this handout picture released February 18, 2022. (Press Service of the Ukrainian Air Assault Forces/Handout via Reuters)Russia Ukraine Crisis Live: An estimated 40% to 50% of Russian ground forces deployed in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border have moved into attack positions nearer the border, said a US defense official, pointing this out as a further indication that the Russians are preparing for a potential invasion.
Satellite imagery taken this week shows military activity in multiple locations across Belarus, the annexed Crimea region of Ukraine and western Russia near Ukraine’s border. US-based Maxar Technologies, which has been tracking the buildup of Russian forces for weeks, said the images show recent helicopter deployments, consisting of both troop transport and ground attack helicopters, at multiple locations close to the border. They also show additional ground attack aircraft, air defense units and drone equipment have been deployed, it said.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine within days, US President Joe Biden said Friday after separatists backed by Moscow told civilians to leave breakaway regions on buses, a move the West fears is part of a pretext for an attack. The US now estimates that Russia probably has amassed between 1,69,000 and 1,90,000 personnel in and near Ukraine.
Ukrainian Army soldiers pose for a photo as they gather to celebrate a Day of Unity in Odessa, Ukraine, February 16, 2022. (AP)
Russia Saturday rejected US allegations that it was responsible for cyberattacks on Ukrainian banking and government websites as baseless, the Russian embassy in the United States said on Twitter.
US Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger said Friday that Russian military intelligence was behind the recent spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that briefly knocked Ukrainian banking and government websites offline. (Reuters)
🟢 US Deputy National Economic Council Director Daleep Singh described sanctions against Russian financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, as well as US export controls that would deny Russia the advanced technology it seeks for its industry and military.
🟡 Booting Russia out of the SWIFT financial system that moves money around the world is one of the most damaging steps the US could take against the Russian economy, but it is opposed by some European allies for the spillover damage it would cause to their economies as well.
🔴 At a time of high oil and gas prices, the US also did not intend to try to block Russian energy from reaching global markets, Singh said, but gave no details. Italy, which is heavily reliant on Russian gas, has pushed for energy to be kept out of any sanctions.
US President Joe Biden, in a series of tweets, said there has been a major uptick of violations of the ceasefire by Russian-backed fighters attempting to provoke Ukraine.
"We're calling out Russia’s plans. Not because we want a conflict, but because we are doing everything in our power to remove any reason Russia may give to justify invading Ukraine," he wrote.
The new US estimate of up to 1,90,000 includes the Russian-backed separatists inside Ukraine, the Russian National Guard and Russian troops in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. These forces were not counted in previous assessments of troops deployed near Ukraine's borders and in neighbouring Belarus.
As further indication that the Russians are preparing for a potential invasion, a US defense official said an estimated 40% to 50% of the ground forces deployed in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border have moved into attack positions nearer the border.
The defense official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal US military assessments. The official also said the number of Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups deployed in the border area had grown to as many as 125, up from 83 two weeks ago. Each battalion tactical group has 750 to 1,000 soldiers. (AP)
Russia Friday welcomed India's position on the Ukraine crisis, amid spike in tensions between the NATO countries and Moscow over the situation in the eastern European nation.
The reaction came a day after India said at the UN Security Council that 'quiet and constructive diplomacy' is the need of the hour and that any step that could escalate the tension should be avoided.
At a meeting of the UN Security Council on the Ukraine situation, India's Permanent Representative to the UN T S Tirumurti Thursday pitched for immediate de-escalation of the situation.
Russia's Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine within days, US President Joe Biden said Friday.
"We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days," Biden told reporters at the White House, adding that Kyiv would be a target. "As of this moment, I am convinced that he has made the decision." (Reuters)
Vladimir Putin's show of force has had a concrete impact on the heart of Ukraine. For instance, the fear of full-scale war — real or not — was enough to see the national airline UIA lose its insurance coverage for some flights. There was even talk of the company possibly relocating to another country. That in turn forced the government to come up with a new fund costing half a billion euros to protect UIA flights.
Ukraine's pro-European course, says Margarete Klein, ensures key economic backing from the EU itself. And one of Putin's goals in the hybrid war is, therefore "to undermine Ukraine's economy." Russia is not so much looking to create a buffer zone against NATO, as to put an end for good to Ukraine's drive to the West. "Hybrid warfare sows the seeds of uncertainty. That, in turn, frightens off potential investors," researcher Klein explains.
Ukraine's westward orientation has proved to be unexpectedly successful. The balance of trade between Germany and Ukraine recovered from the shock of Covid-19 within just one year, again reaching the 7.7 billion euro mark ($8.75bn). "There's a growing impression that Ukraine can get back on track under its own steam," said Alexander Markus, chairman of the German-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry during an online conference in early February. And, commenting on Putin's hybrid warfare, he said: "I don't think it's going to work." There are, he argued, just too many, "young people in the country who are determined to shape their future." (Deutsche Welle)
In Ukraine's Donbas region, where fighting since 2014 between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels has killed some 14,000 people, the rebels announced in videos posted online Friday that they were ordering an "immediate evacuation" to Russia because of the unrest. But metadata embedded in the video files showed they had been created two days earlier.
A group of international monitors in eastern Ukraine that is tasked with keeping the peace reported more than 500 explosions in the 24 hours ending Thursday midday. On Friday, a car exploded outside the main government building in Donetsk, but no casualties were reported, and a UN Refugee Agency convoy came under shelling.
The rebels accuse Ukraine of preparing to invade the region, which Kyiv denies. The unrest may be part of Moscow's suspected playbook of portraying Ukraine as the aggressor, thereby giving Russia grounds to invade. Putin sent his emergencies minister to the Rostov region bordering Ukraine to help organise the evacuation. He ordered the government to give 10,000 rubles (about $130) to each evacuee. That's equivalent to about half the average monthly salary in the area. (AP)
Russia and China watered down a G20 finance leaders' statement on geopolitical risks to the global economy as a contentious meeting ended Friday, deleting a reference to "current" tensions as financial markets fretted over the prospect of war in Ukraine.
The gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 major economies was one of the most fractious since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, according to people familiar with the discussions. (Reuters)
Ukraine's military intelligence Friday tweeted that they have information on mines planted in many social infrastructure facilities in separatist-controlled Donetsk by Russian special forces.
"These measures are aimed at destabilizing the situation in the temporarily occupied territories of our state and creating grounds for accusing Ukraine of terrorist acts," the tweet read.
The United States and its allies are "converging" on a final sanctions package if Russia invades Ukraine, White House Deputy Security Adviser Daleep Singh said on Friday, Reuters reported.
Ukraine's top security official Oleksiy Danilov on Friday accused Russia of staging provocations in eastern Ukraine to try to provoke Ukraine's military to respond, but added that Ukraine would stick to peaceful ways to defuse the crisis.
In a joint briefing, Minister for Integration of the Temporary Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk said Russia was trying to force Ukraine into making concessions.Danilov said Ukraine had no plans to liberate separatist-held territories by force, adding that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was unlikely. (Reuters)
Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine said on Friday they planned to evacuate around 700,000 people to Russia from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).
Most DPR residents are Russian speakers and many have already been granted Russian citizenship. Ukraine says the people who run the DPR are not separatists but Russian proxies, something the Kremlin denies. (Reuters)
Russian-backed separatist authorities in eastern Ukraine said on Friday that a car had been blown up near their government building in the centre of the city of Donetsk, the TASS news agency reported. Russia's Interfax news agency reported that nobody was hurt in the incident. Russia's RIA news agency reported that there had been a large explosion. (Reuters)
With East-West tensions at their highest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday the world is probably a more dangerous place now than during the Cold War.
Guterres warned that a small mistake or miscommunication between major powers could have catastrophic consequences.
“I am often asked whether we are in a new Cold War,” Guterres said in his opening speech at an annual security conference in Munich. “My answer is that the threat to global security now is more complex and probably higher than at that time.”
During the decades-long standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 20th century, “there were mechanisms that enabled the protagonists to calculate risks and use back-channels to prevent crises,” Guterres said. “Today, many of those systems no longer exist and most of the people trained to use them are no longer here with us.” (AP)
Oksana Pokalchuk, head of Amnesty International Ukraine, says that Russian state media is reporting a “major” explosion near a government building at the centre of Donetsk.
One by one, U.N. Security Council members called for a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Ukraine. Even Russia’s deputy foreign minister said everything should be done to find a diplomatic solution. But he didn’t respond to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appeal to state unequivocally that Russia will not invade Ukraine.
So what Blinken called the most immediate threat to international peace and security in the world today remains, with all eyes still on Russia.
The annual Security Council meeting was called by Russia to focus on implementation of the Minsk Agreements aimed at restoring peace to eastern Ukraine where Russian-backed separatist have been at war with government troops since Moscow’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
The open session brought together all the key players who now confront broader security grievances from Moscow: It is demanding a NATO ban on Ukraine joining the alliance, which its members say is impossible.
Blinken, alluding to a speech to the Security Council by his predecessor Colin Powell in 2003 laying out purported U.S. evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ahead of the American invasion which turned out to be erroneous, told council members he wanted to be clear: “I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one.” (AP)
A separatist leader in eastern Ukraine has announced the evacuation of civilians to Russia amid soaring tensions.
Denish Pushilin, the head of the separatist government in the Donetsk region, said in a statement Friday that women, children and the elderly will be evacuated first, and that Russia has prepared the necessary facilities to accommodate them.
The move comes amid a spike in shelling across the line of contact between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed rebels in the region in recent days that fuelled Western fears that Moscow could use it as a pretext for an invasion.
The separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted in 2014 and has killed over 14,000 people. (AP)
The U.S. now estimates that Russia probably has amassed between 169,000 and 190,000 personnel in and near Ukraine, up from about 100,000 on Jan. 30, said Michael Carpenter, the permanent U.S. representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
In addition to troops along the border, in neighboring Belarus and in Crimea, he said the estimate includes Russian-led forces in eastern Ukraine and also internal security units deployed to these areas. It was unclear if these forces were included in the most recent estimate of 150,000 troops.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday heralded NATO unity during the escalating Ukraine crisis and warned Russia that the U.S. and Western allies stood ready to respond with tough sanctions if President Vladimir Putin moves forward with an invasion of Ukraine.
In a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg as the annual Munich Security Conference got underway, Harris thanked the alliance for “all that you have done” throughout the crisis.
“We remain, of course, open to and desirous of diplomacy, as it relates to the dialogue and the discussions we have had with Russia, but we are also committed, if Russia takes aggressive action, to ensure there will be severe consequence in terms of the sanctions we have discussed,” Harris told Stoltenberg. “And we know the alliance is strong in that regard."
Harris and her top national security aides huddled with Stoltenberg after President Joe Biden on Thursday in Washington warned that “every indication” suggests Russia is "prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine.” (AP)