The United States said Wednesday that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, and that Russian troops and separatist forces surrounding the country were in combat-ready positions, New York Times reports.
“They are ready to go,” John F. Kirby, the top Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. “They could attack at any time,” he added, “with a significant military force.”
CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen has witnessed what he describes as “a lot of very ominous movement” on the ground in Russia, near northeast Ukraine.
“We’ve seen … military trucks, who have actually had their license plates on backwards. They turned the license plates around, which could be them trying to mask some sort of movement,” Pleitgen told CNN.
“The Russian military really [is] in a position where it certainly seems as though they could strike at any point in time,” he added.
Meanwhile, further south, near Donetsk, CNN’s Pleitgen noted other examples of assembled Russian military.
“You see a lot of Russian convoys there that seem to be forming,” he said. “[It is] unclear whether or not they’ve gone over the border yet, the way that all of this could happen is, you might have two areas where the Russians might try to go across the border.”
Pleitgen closed his live report by offering a statement on the general atmosphere in the region.
“You really feel how things are getting more tense here by the minute,” noted Pleitgen, adding, “you certainly also see that the Russian military is on the ground here, and certainly at least seems to be in a position to be able to strike at any point in time if Vladimir Putin chooses to order that.”
New York Times reported that Ukraine girded for war by mobilizing its reservists and declaring a 30-day state of emergency as cyberattacks knocked out government institutions including Parliament, the Foreign Ministry and the cabinet of ministers.
In Moscow, the manufactured legal justification for an invasion fell into place. The Kremlin announced that separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine had requested Russia’s “help in repelling the aggression of the armed forces and formations of Ukraine.”
Ukraine denied any such aggression and stressed that none was planned.
In the capital, Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky made an impassioned bid to spare his nation from war, appealing directly to the Russian people to remember their ties to Ukraine.
“Listen to the voice of reason,” Mr. Zelensky said in a nationally televised address early Thursday, adding that Kremlin propaganda painting Ukrainians as aggressors was a lie. “The people of Ukraine want peace, the authorities in Ukraine want peace.”
