UPDATE: 3:21 p.m.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden urged Russia to step back from the brink of war on Tuesday and said reports that Russia has withdrawn some forces from the Ukraine border have not been verified.
“To the citizens of Russia: you are not our enemy, and I don’t believe you want a bloody, destructive war against Ukraine,” Biden said in nationally televised remarks from the White House.
Biden said the United States is “not seeking direct confrontation with Russia” but that if Russia were to attack Americans in Ukraine, “We will respond forcefully.”
Biden said the United States and its NATO allies are prepared for whatever happens and that Russia will pay a steep economic price if Moscow launches an invasion.
He said a Russian attack on Ukraine remains a possibility and reports that some Russian forces have moved away from the Ukraine border have not yet been verified by the United States.
“We are ready to respond decisively to a Russian attack on Ukraine, which remains very much a possibility,” Biden.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland; Editing by Leslie Adler and Alistair Bell)
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UPDATE: 12:11 p.m.
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia said on Tuesday some of its troops were returning to base after exercises near Ukraine and mocked Western warnings about a looming invasion, but NATO and the United States said they had yet to see any evidence of a de-escalation that could avert war.
President Vladimir Putin said Russia was ready to keep talking to the West about security issues but would not be satisfied with vague talk that Ukraine would not be ready to join NATO any time soon.
The military announcement marked the first sign from Moscow that it may be ready to reverse a build-up of some 130,000 troops near its border with Ukraine, which has triggered one of the deepest crises in East-West relations since the Cold War.
Tensions remained high, but German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said after meeting Putin in the Kremlin that the withdrawal of some Russian forces was a good sign.
Moscow did not say how many units were being withdrawn, and how far. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Washington had not seen evidence of any pullback yet.
Ukraine said the reported pullback needed to be seen to be believed. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said “the intelligence that we’re seeing today is still not encouraging”.
The Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security said the country’s defence ministry and banks Privatbank and Oshadbank had come under cyber attack.
“It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of little dirty tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale,” said the centre, without specifying who the aggressor was.
DIPLOMATIC SIGNALS
NATO’s chief welcomed signals from Russia in the past two days that it may be looking for a diplomatic solution but urged Moscow to demonstrate its will to act.
“There are signs from Moscow that diplomacy should continue. This gives grounds for cautious optimism. But so far we have not seen any sign of de-escalation on the ground from the Russian side,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters.
He said Russia often left military equipment behind after exercises, creating the potential for forces to regroup.
At a joint news conference with Scholz, Putin referred only briefly to the troop moves and did not go into details.
Russia has always denied planning to invade Ukraine, saying it can exercise troops on its own territory as it sees fit. It has been pressing for a set of security guarantees from the West, including a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO.
Putin told reporters Russia would not be satisfied with talk that the former Soviet republic was not ready to join any time soon and was demanding that the issue be resolved now.
“As for war in Europe…about whether we want it or not? Of course not. That is why we put forward proposals for a negotiation process, the result of which should be an agreement on ensuring equal security for everyone, including our country,” he said.
Scholz said the diplomatic possibilities were far from exhausted.
“For us Germans but also Europeans, sustainable security can only be reached .. with Russia. Therefore it should be possible to find a solution. No matter how difficult and serious the situation seems to be, I refuse to say it is hopeless,” he said.
In a separate development, Russia’s lower house of parliament voted to ask Putin to recognise two Russian-backed breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent.
Recognition of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics could kill off the Minsk peace process in east Ukraine, where a conflict between government forces and Moscow-backed separatists has killed 15,000 people.
Asked about the move, Putin said the regions’ problems should be solved on the basis of the Minsk agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015 but have never been implemented. Scholz said all sides should stick to those accords.
“COULD BE IMMINENT”
Russia’s show of force near Ukraine’s borders has prompted months of frantic Western diplomacy and drawn threats of severe sanctions if it invades, culminating in a crescendo of U.S. and British warnings in recent days that this could happen at any time.
The Kremlin sought to portray its moves as proof that Western talk of war had been both false and hysterical.
“February 15, 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Russia’s defence ministry published footage showing tanks and other armoured vehicles being loaded onto railway flatcars. But Western military analysts said they needed more information to judge the significance of the latest troop movements.
Konrad Muzyka, director of the Poland-based Rochan consultancy, told Reuters it would take several days to verify the latest moves via satellite imagery.
“It should also be noted that new trains with equipment from Central Russia keep on arriving near the border and that Russian forces continue to move towards staging areas,” he said.
Commercial satellite images taken on Sunday and Monday showed a flurry of Russian military activity at several locations near Ukraine, including large deployments of troops and attack helicopters, and warplanes moving to forward locations.
Russian shares, government bonds and the rouble, which have been hit by fears of impending conflict, rose sharply as the situation seemed to ease slightly, and Ukrainian government bonds rallied. Oil dropped more than 3% from a seven-year high reached on Monday.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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ORIGINAL STORY
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia said on Tuesday some of its military units were returning to their bases after exercises near Ukraine, following days of U.S. and British warnings that Moscow might invade its neighbor at any time.
It was not clear how many units were being withdrawn, and by what distance, after a build-up of an estimated 130,000 Russian troops to the north, east and south of Ukraine.
The development drew a cautious response from Ukraine and Britain but prompted a sharp rally on financial markets. Western military analysts said it was too soon to be sure of the extent of any de-escalation.
“We’ve always said the troops will return to their bases after the exercises are over. This is the case this time as well,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
He accused the United States of fueling the crisis by warning repeatedly of an impending invasion, to the point where Peskov said President Vladimir Putin had made jokes about it.
“He asks (us) to find out if the exact time, to the hour, of the start of the war has been published. It’s impossible to be understanding of this manic information madness,” Peskov told reporters.
Britain, which with the United States has led the warnings of imminent action, reacted cautiously.
“The Russians have claimed that they have no plans for an invasion, but we will need to see a full scale removal of troops to show that is true,” Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told LBC radio.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv would only believe that Russia was moving to de-escalate the situation if it saw for itself that Russian troops were being pulled back.
“If we see a withdrawal, we will believe in a de-escalation,” Interfax Ukraine quoted him as saying.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on the latest Western diplomatic mission to defuse the crisis, began talks with Putin in the Kremlin.
A Russian defence ministry spokesman said that while large-scale drills across the country continued, some units of the Southern and Western military districts adjacent to Ukraine had completed their exercises and started returning to base.
The Southern military district said its forces had started withdrawing from Crimea and returning to their bases after completing drills on the peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Video footage published by the defense ministry showed some tanks and other armored vehicles being loaded onto railway flatcars.
“February 15, 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Russian shares, government bonds and the rouble, which have been hit by fears of impending conflict, rose sharply, and Ukrainian government bonds also rallied.
CAUTIOUS RESPONSE
Western military analysts were cautious about the significance of the latest troop movements.
Many of the Russian forces in Belarus for drills due to end on Sunday have come from thousands of miles away in the Eastern Military District. Tuesday’s announcement made no mention of those forces.
“Potentially good news, but we should wait to see where the Eastern and Central Military District goes, especially after Feb 20,” Rob Lee, a military analyst who specializes in Russia, wrote on Twitter.
“As long as that remains nearby, Russia will have the capacity to conduct a significant escalation, though possibly not on as short notice.”
Konrad Muzyka, director of the Poland-based Rochan consultancy, told Reuters it would take several days to verify the latest moves via satellite imagery.
“It should also be noted that new trains with equipment from Central Russia keep on arriving near the border and that Russian forces continue to move towards staging areas. The announcement stands in a direct opposition to what Russia has been doing for the past few days,” he said.
Commercial satellite images taken on Sunday and Monday showed a flurry of Russian military activity at several locations near Ukraine, according to the private U.S. company that released the pictures.
U.S.-based Maxar Technologies pointed to the arrival of several large deployments of troops and attack helicopters as well as new deployments of ground attack aircraft and fighter-bomber jets to forward locations.
(Reporting by Sarah Marsh, Anton Kolodyazhnyy in Moscow, Kylie MacLellan in London; writing by Tom Balmforth and Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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