Artillery Exchanges In Eastern Ukraine May Presage Invasion, US Warns
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As the United States and Russia traded conflicting accounts over whether Russian forces were really pulling back from the Ukrainian border, as Moscow has insisted, the separatists claimed they had come under fire from the Ukrainians.
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Residents near Ukraine’s front line rushed into basements for cover Thursday as exchanges of artillery fire with Russian-backed separatists reached their most intense level in months, an ominous development amid Western fears that Russia might use the fighting as a pretext to invade Ukraine.
As the United States and Russia traded conflicting accounts over whether Russian forces were really pulling back from the Ukrainian border, as Moscow has insisted, the separatists claimed they had come under fire from the Ukrainians. That is precisely the sort of incident Western officials have warned Russia might try to use to justify military action.
At the White House, President Joe Biden said “every indication we have is they’re prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine.” He said the United States had “reason to believe” that Russia was “engaged in a false flag operation to have an excuse to go in.”Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unscheduled trip to New York, where he told the United Nations Security Council that US intelligence “indicates clearly” that Russian forces surrounding the country from three sides “are preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days.”
The escalation of tensions rippled throughout the markets, where stock prices plunged.
Russia continued to insist Thursday that it had no plans to invade, issuing new updates about troop withdrawals and dismissing the US invasion warnings as “information terrorism.”
The Russian government also published a lengthy response to US proposals made last month to ease tensions, maintaining the Kremlin’s push to regain a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and issuing a vague warning of new military deployments. If the United States does not accede to its demands, the document said, “Russia will be forced to respond, including through the implementation of measures of a military-technical character.”
In eastern Ukraine on Thursday, where a kindergarten was shelled, the spike in violence evoked the sort of scenario that Western leaders have been warning of amid the enormous Russian troop buildup surrounding Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia this week repeated his false claim that Ukraine was carrying out a “genocide” against Russian speakers in the country’s east, while the Russian authorities announced an investigation into supposed “mass graves” of Russian-speaking victims of Ukrainian forces.
And on Thursday, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, offered an ominous assessment. “The excessive concentration of Ukrainian forces near the contact line, together with possible provocations, can pose terrible danger,” he said.
“Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack,” he said, citing a “so-called terrorist bombing” or “a fake, even a real attack” with chemical weapons. “This could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine,” he said, “or an outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian government.”
If so, it would not be the first time.
When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, it did so after claiming that Russian speakers there were threatened by the pro-Western revolution in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, which the Kremlin described as a fascist coup. And in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia after the Georgian army moved into a Russian-backed separatist enclave there.
The skirmishing in Eastern Europe between Ukrainian forces and Kremlin-backed separatists is long-standing, but Thursday’s violence was the worst since a cease-fire was reached two years ago.
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