The United States believes Russia could launch an attack on Ukraine “at any point,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday.
“Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation. We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine,” Psaki said during a press briefing, adding later that the language was “more stark than we have been.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday with the aim of preventing an invasion by Russia, which has placed 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and has sent forces to Belarus to engage in military drills.
The meeting comes after top-level diplomatic discussions took place in Europe between officials representing Russia, NATO, and the United States last week. Blinken and Lavrov spoke by phone on Tuesday and agreed to meet.
Blinken ostensibly plans to persuade Russia to deescalate the situation and accept terms offered by the United States and its allies. Psaki warned that there could be major economic consequences for Russia if it proceeds with an invasion of Ukraine.
“It is up to the Russians to determine which path they are going to take, and the consequences are going to be severe if they don’t take the diplomatic path,” Psaki said.
During a video call in December, Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia would face sanctions if it invaded Russia and that American forces would strengthen NATO’s eastern flank and increase military aid to Ukraine if an invasion occurred.
Psaki also hit back at reports that removing Russia from the SWIFT global banking system was off the table.
“No option is off the table, in our view,” she said.
The Hill notes:
As of last week, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. intelligence community had not assessed whether Putin has made his mind up on invading Ukraine but nevertheless characterized the threat as high.
U.S. officials last week said they have evidence of Russia laying the groundwork for a false flag operation that could serve as a pretext for invading Ukraine.
“We do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said last week of the possibility of a false flag.
This followed another U.S. official, who claimed Moscow was preparing to accuse Ukraine of an “imminent attack” against Russia that would be used as justification for an invasion.
“The Russian military plans to begin these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could begin between mid-January and mid-February,” the official said. “We saw this playbook in 2014 with Crimea.”
The Biden administration and its allies in Europe have also painted recent actions by Putin in Kazakhstan as abetting the suppression of legitimate protesters. Moscow and Kazakhstan’s government, however, have countered that recent “protests” in the latter country were a coup d’etat and “color revolution” comprised of “foreign-backed” terrorists.
The “destructive internal and external forces” took advantage of the fuel protests to deploy “well-organised groups of militants under their control” that had “obviously trained at terrorist camps abroad,” Putin contended after helping Kazakhstan quash the uprising.
Although the Biden government and Europe’s internationalist establishment call on Russia to de-escalate, they have not backed down from admitting Ukraine to NATO. Doing so would put an end to the tensions, as Russia’s threats to invade are based on preventing the border country from joining what Moscow has come to see as an anti-Russian military coalition — in accordance with assurances Russia had received that Ukraine would not be added to NATO.
Moreover, the establishment’s talk of an imminent false flag is ironic, given that, for more than a century, every major conflict that involved the United States was based on some sort of false flag, whether it was a complete false flag (the infamous “Remember the Maine” that started the Spanish-American War) or a genuine attack in which the American government hid its own complicity (the sinking of the Lusitania and the attack on Pearl Harbor that began World Wars I and II, respectively).
Is U.S. intelligence telling the truth about the situation in Ukraine? Or is it merely projecting to conceal an upcoming false flag of its own?
