UPDATE: 5:25 p.m.
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out at the United Nations Security Council on Thursday how Washington believes Russia could seek to invade Ukraine, warning that Moscow was preparing to attack its neighbor in the “coming days.”
Blinken, as other U.S. officials have done over the past two weeks, accused Russia of planning to manufacture a pretext for an attack on Ukraine that could include “a fake, even a real, attack using chemical weapons,” and said: “Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide.”
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin rejected Blinken’s statement a “regrettable” and “dangerous” move that further fuels tensions. He said Russian forces remain on Russian territory and some units were already returning to their bases following exercises.
Blinken pushed Moscow to announce “with no qualification, equivocation or deflection” that it will not invade Ukraine.
“State it clearly. State it plainly to the world, and then demonstrate it by sending your troops, your tanks, the planes back to their barracks and hangars and sending your diplomats to the negotiating table,” Blinken said.
Russia has denied it wants to invade Ukraine. The crisis, however, has prompted the U.S.-led NATO alliance to shore up its presence in member states closer to Russia or Ukraine. Ukraine is not a NATO member and Russia does not want it to be allowed to join.
Blinken made his U.N. appearance at a meeting of the 15-member council on the Minsk agreements, which aim to end an 8-year-long conflict between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country.
“I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one,” he said.
Tensions between Moscow and Western capitals are high following weeks of United States accusations that Russia has deployed up to 150,000 troops near Ukraine‘s borders for an invasion. Moscow accuses the West of hysteria.
Blinken said U.S. information indicated that Russian forces “are preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days” and had identified main targets, including the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Blinken said he has asked Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to meet in Europe next week.
Britain’s Minister for Europe and North America, James Cleverly, told the Security Council: “Russia has deployed the forces necessary to invade Ukraine, and now has them readied for action.”
‘CIRCUS’
Russian deputy minister Vershinin had appealed to council members not to turn the meeting “into a circus” by presenting a “baseless accusation saying that Russia allegedly was going to attack Ukraine.”
“I think we’ve had enough speculation on that,” Vershinin said. “We have a long ago clarified everything and explained everything.”
A senior U.S. official said earlier on Thursday that Russia could use the Security Council meeting as part of a bid to “establish a pretext for a potential invasion” after Russia shared a document containing allegations that war crimes had been committed in southeastern Ukraine.
The Russian document, circulated to council members and seen by Reuters, accuses Ukrainian authorities of “exterminating the civilian population” in eastern Ukraine.
The U.S. official rejected the Russian claims as “categorically false.”
Referring to ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine, Vershinin told the council they “are still presented as foreigners in their own country” and targeted by the Ukrainian military. He told council members they would be “horrified” by the document Russia had shared with them.
Earlier on Thursday, Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces traded accusations of firing shells across the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine, in what Kyiv said appeared to be a “provocation.”
Yaşar Halit Çevik, chief monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told the Security Council that while some 500 explosions had been recorded overnight, “the tension may seem to be easing.”
The U.N. Security Council has met dozens of times to discuss the Ukraine crisis since Russia annexed Ukraine‘s Crimea region in 2014. It cannot take any action because Russia is a veto-power along with France, Britain, China and the United States.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Humeyra Pamuk, Daphne Psaledakis, Doina Chiacu; Editing by by Raissa Kasolowsky, Chizu Nomiyama, Will Dunham and Grant McCool)
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ORIGINAL STORY:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States warned on Wednesday that Russia could use false claims about the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass region, including reports of mass graves and allegations of chemical weapons production, to justify an invasion of the former Soviet republic.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Washington was yet to see signs Russia was de-escalating tensions on its border with Ukraine. Concern over a potential Russian invasion has not diminished and Russian forces were in fact moving into “fighting positions,” he said, despite Moscow’s assertion that it was moving some troops back to their bases.
Price said Russian officials and media had planted stories in the press that were “entirely untrue.”
“This (the stories being untrue) however has not stopped the Russians from advancing these false claims, to include reports of unmarked mass graves of civilians allegedly killed by Ukrainian armed forces, and statements that the United States or Ukraine are developing biological or chemical weapons… for use in the Russian-controlled territories,” Price told reporters at a regular press briefing.
He did not provide details, but the State Department last month published a fact sheet rebutting what it called Russian “disinformation,” linking to news stories that quoted Russian officials making similar statements.
Price said the United States was particularly concerned by Russian President Vladimir Putin saying, without evidence, that “genocide” was taking place in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region.
“These are false narratives that Russia is developing as a pretext for military actions against Ukraine,” he said.
Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – collectively known as the Donbass – broke away from Ukrainian government control in 2014 and proclaimed themselves independent, sparking a conflict with the Ukrainian army.
The United Nations has said more than 3,100 civilians have been killed and more than 7,000 injured since fighting began.
The Biden administration said earlier this month it had intelligence that Russia could use a fabricated video showing the graphic aftermath of an explosion as a pretext for invasion of Ukraine.
No video has yet emerged and officials have not provided evidence to back up their statement that Russia is preparing to fabricate a pretext for a conflict.
Other Western nations have said they agreed with the U.S. assessment that Russia is preparing to fabricate a pretext. A European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was a “high degree of confidence” that any invasion would be preceded by some sort of incident designed to provide a pretext.
“They obviously have options that they have worked up on that and it would be foolish to predict the precise one,” the diplomat said.
Russia has denied the accusations, says it has no plans to invade Ukraine, and has accused the West of hysteria.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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