Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday that the U.S. will sell 250 M1A2 Abrams tanks to Poland, giving a key NATO ally that borders Russia a substantial boost in firepower.
Adding the tanks to the Polish arsenal will ensure more equitable security burden-sharing in NATO, he said, although he noted that no delivery date has been set.
The Ukrainian Government and Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk are currently trading accusations of each shelling the other, further escalating tensions within the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian and United States officials say that these Russian-backed separatists are only pursuing these allegations of shelling as a pretext to invade Ukraine.
President Biden claimed at a brief press conference yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has already decided to invade Ukraine in the coming days. He reportedly received information that Russia has Ukraine completely surrounded and that the Kremlin would be targetting Kyiv. This is a sudden turn-around for Biden, who had just stated 72 hours ago that no final decision from Putin had been made to invade Ukraine. This follows an earlier prediction made by the White House that Russia would invade Ukraine on February 16th.
Seventy presidents and prime ministers from Europe and Africa are gathered today in Brussels for a long-awaited European Union-African Union summit, the sixth such summit between the two blocs. But ahead of that gathering, Europe’s 27 leaders huddled together for an emergency meeting to discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
The terms “deterrence” and “coercive diplomacy” have figured prominently in debates over how the West should respond to the ongoing crisis over a potential Russian incursion into Ukraine.
Russia is boosting its military buildup and encircling much of Ukraine despite Moscow’s claims that it is withdrawing some troops, the United States and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday.
Images showed locations in Belarus, western Russia and annexed Crimea on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Satellite images show Russia has moved some of its military equipment that was deployed near Ukraine, but other hardware has arrived and Moscow still has a lot of forces and equipment near its ex-Soviet neighbor, a private US company said on Thursday.
Russia has denied planning any attacks, while Ukraine military denied accusations that government troops attacked.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday said Russia was violating ceasefire agreements under the Minsk accords after Kyiv earlier accused Russian-backed separatists of shelling a village.
America Must Push Back—Without Getting Dragged In
The day after the military staged a coup in Burkina Faso in January, supporters of the new regime took to the streets waving Russian flags. The scene may sound like a throwback to the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence in Africa, but the demonstrators were taken with more recent examples of the Kremlin’s actions on the continent. They spoke approvingly about Russia’s deployment of mercenaries in Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic (CAR) to fight off Islamist insurgents. “The Russians got good results in other African countries,” a supporter of the coup told The New York Times. “We hope they can do the same here.” According to the Daily Beast, the lieutenant colonel who led the coup, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, had tried and failed to get the incumbent president to invite in Russian military contractors to counter threats to the government—and now that he is in charge, he may well ask Moscow for military help.
No Russian Invasion Can Undo Ukrainian Nationhood
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of how he regards Ukraine, the nation he is threatening to invade. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush that the former Soviet state “is not even a country.” The Russian president believes the Ukrainians and the Russians are one people. It follows that Ukrainians cannot reject being part of Russia and any “anti-Russian” sentiment in Ukraine must be the result of Western meddling rather than a reflection of the preferences of Ukrainians. Putin has used this argument to characterize peaceful political mobilization in Ukraine as foreign-orchestrated coups. He also dismisses polls showing that Ukrainians now favor European Union and NATO accession over membership in Russian-led political and economic organizations.