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.
Russia has expelled the second-most senior American diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as tensions between the two countries continue to rise over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the State Department said Thursday.
Russia has imposed “a new normal” on Europe, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at the conclusion of alliance talks in Brussels, and the defense organization must respond.
Russia does not want to invade Ukraine
Both Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and its Foreign Secretary, Sergey Laverov, have repeatedly stated that Russia does not intend to invade Ukraine. Logic also tells us that if they had wished to do so, they would have done it long ago. The threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a western invention.
On Tuesday, the day before the United States had previously claimed Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden gave a speech in which he doubled down on his threats of a “bloody, destructive war” even though no Russian invasion was forthcoming.
KYIV—Oleksandr Biletskyi is standing in a lecture hall on the outskirts of Kyiv laying out the items he considers most necessary to have on hand for emergencies. On the table in front of him, he’s placed a bag containing a compass, a pocketknife, a carabiner and a roll of tape. Gently, he adds three more bags: one with a Kalashnikov, one with a shotgun and one with a pistol. “We have to prepare for anything,” he tells me.
Neither Membership nor Neutrality Is the Answer
With Russia massing troops on Ukraine’s border and demanding an end to NATO enlargement, a heated international debate has broken out over whether limits on future membership in the alliance might resolve the crisis and avert war. Some have argued that it is time to close the door to new members, while others argue it would be a grave mistake to let Russian President Vladimir Putin dictate the terms of European security. Yet one all-important question has been missing from the debate: what being welcomed into NATO—or kept out—would mean for Ukraine itself.