With Western countries’ fears of war in eastern Europe rising, the White House said US President Joe Biden’s national security team told him they still believed Russia could launch an attack in Ukraine “at any time”, and that he planned to meet with his top advisers on Sunday. to discuss the crisis.
On Saturday, G7 foreign ministers said they saw no evidence that Russia was reducing military activity near Ukraine’s borders, noting that their “grave concern” about the situation remained.
After Kiev and Moscow traded accusations over new bombing near the border, France and Germany urged their citizens in Ukraine to leave.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russian forces had begun to “get closer” to the border with Ukraine, according to Reuters.
“We hope that he (Putin) will retreat from the brink of war,” Austin told a news conference in Lithuania, adding that an invasion of Ukraine could be avoided.
Russia ordered the army to mobilize its forces and demanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “NATO” not to annex Ukraine, and said that Western expectations that it is planning to invade Ukraine is wrong and dangerous.
Russia added that it had begun withdrawing its forces, but Washington and its allies said that the military buildup was increasing.
Washington and NATO say Moscow’s main demands are impossible, but concerns are growing in Ukraine about Putin’s plans.
Expressing his frustration at the Munich Security Conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the global security architecture was “almost breaking” and urged the permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany and Turkey to meet to offer new security guarantees to his country.
“The rules that the world agreed on decades ago are no longer valid… They are not keeping pace with new threats and ineffective against them. It is like a cough syrup when you need a coronavirus vaccine,” Zelensky said.
Separatists announce general mobilization
Russian-backed separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine announced a general military mobilization on Saturday, a day after ordering women and children to leave for Russia over what they described as an imminent attack by Ukrainian forces.
Denis Pushilin, president of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Donbass, eastern Ukraine, said in a video statement that he had signed a decree on general mobilization and invited men “capable of bearing arms” to come to the military posts.
Shortly thereafter, Leonid Bashnik, leader of the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic, signed a similar decree.
Kiev categorically denied the separatists’ accusations of an imminent attack by Ukrainian forces, and said, along with Western leaders, that the build-up, evacuation and escalation of bombing along the ceasefire line during the past days were part of Russia’s plan to create a pretext for the invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister denied the fall of any Ukrainian shells on Russian territory and demanded an independent international investigation into the alleged incidents.
The Ukrainian military accused Russia of faking the pictures of the missiles to show that they were Ukrainian, and said that the mercenaries had arrived in separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine to carry out provocations in cooperation with Russian special forces.
“The purpose of these provocations will, of course, be to accuse Ukraine of further escalation,” the military added.
nuclear drills
The Kremlin said that Russia had successfully tested hypersonic and cruise missiles at sea at land targets during its military exercises.
Putin witnessed the exercises with the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko via screens inside the “operations center”.
Austin said the nuclear exercises were causing concern among defense leaders around the world as the Russian military focused on a massive buildup of forces around Ukraine and there was a risk of “accident or error”.
The Russian Foreign Ministry stated that Minister Sergey Lavrov told his French counterpart by phone that “ignoring Russia’s legitimate rights in this region negatively affects stability not only on the European continent but also in the world.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that Russia knows that the alliance cannot meet its demands, which include the withdrawal of its forces from the former communist countries of Eastern Europe that chose to join the alliance.