Ukraine Live Updates: Russia Escalates Tensions but Still Offers to Talk
President Biden prepared to talk with NATO allies by phone on Friday to discuss the threat to Ukraine after a night of tense fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainians.
KYIV, Ukraine — Tensions between Russia and the West ratcheted up on Friday as Moscow announced plans to test nuclear-capable missiles and held war games on NATO’s doorstep in Belarus, while the United States sharply raised its estimate of Russian forces menacing Ukraine in a crisis that risks erupting into the biggest conflict in Europe in decades.
As President Biden prepared to speak with NATO allies on Friday, U.S. officials said that as many as 190,000 Russian troops were arrayed near Ukraine’s borders, far more than the 150,000 that Mr. Biden described just days ago. The officials also repeated warnings that Moscow would try to manufacture a provocation by Ukraine to justify an invasion of its smaller neighbor.
Those fears escalated when a leader of Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine claimed in a video message on Friday that a Ukrainian military offensive would soon take place, and called for residents in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic to evacuate to Russia. It was impossible to determine whether the claim was real, but the message followed an intensification of shelling along the front line between Ukraine and the Russia-backed rebels, and highlighted ominous signs that a conflict that has simmered for years could become the spark for a wider war.
Consistent with Russia’s contradictory messaging throughout the crisis, however, Mr. Putin said on Friday that Russia was prepared for further diplomacy, and President Biden’s secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, accepted an invitation to meet next week with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov. The announcement of the meeting calmed jittery markets and suggested that there was still hope for the crisis to be resolved without war.
But Mr. Putin emphasized that Russia would continue to insist on far-reaching demands for “security guarantees” in Eastern Europe that the West has rejected — such as a halt to the eastward expansion of NATO and the pullback of the alliance’s forces from the region.
“We are ready to go on the negotiating track under the condition that all questions will be considered together, without being separated from Russia’s main proposals,” Mr. Putin said in a news conference alongside his close ally President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, who was visiting Moscow.
The Biden administration has said it believes Russia is poised to invade Ukraine within days. Although Moscow insists that it has no such plans, it has vowed to mount “a tough response” if the United States and its NATO partners do not roll back their presence in Eastern Europe.
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Russian or Russian-
backed military
positions as of Feb. 13
Minsk
Ukraine
BELARUS
RUSSIA
Klintsy
Kursk
POLAND
Kyiv
Lviv
Kharkiv
Boguchar
UKRAINE
Stanytsia Luhanska
Dnipro
Luhansk
Donetsk
Approximate line
separating Ukrainian
and Russian-backed
separatist forces.
MOLDOVA
Rostov-on-Don
Tiraspol
ROMANIA
Odessa
SEA OF
AZOV
CRIMEA
Sevastopol
200 MILES
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Russian or Russian-backed
military positions as of Feb. 13
Ukraine
Yelnya
BELARUS
RUSSIA
Brest
Klintsy
POL.
Pogonovo
Kyiv
Lviv
Soloti
UKRAINE
Stanytsia Luhanska
Luhansk
Kryvyi Rih
MOLDOVA
Donetsk
ROMANIA
Odessa
Approximate line
separating Ukrainian
and Russian-backed
separatist forces.
CRIMEA
Sevastopol
BLACK SEA
200 MILES
In a demonstration of strength, Russia will conduct major drills this weekend that will include the launch of ballistic and cruise missiles, the country’s defense ministry said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Russia’s drills will test its strategic nuclear forces, which include the land-based launchers, bombers and warships used to deliver nuclear weapons. They will involve the Black Sea Fleet, which has been engaged in large-scale exercises in the region bordering Ukraine. Mr. Putin will preside over them from a “situation center,” the Kremlin said.
The Defense Ministry said the drills were planned in advance, and Mr. Peskov denied that they were intended to raise tensions. But they will come at a critical juncture in the standoff over Ukraine.
An uneasy calm settled over eastern Ukraine on Friday after a night punctuated by explosions and bursts of gunfire in as many as 30 villages and towns along a 250-mile stretch of land separating Ukrainian and Russia-backed forces. Although periodic exchanges of gunfire are not uncommon in the grinding, eight-year trench war, that violence was of a heightened scale.
As the events play out, officials in Russia, the United States and in Ukraine are trying to shape the narrative.
U.S. officials said they were “watching closely” out of concern that Russia could use violence in eastern Ukraine as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Mr. Blinken told the United Nations Security Council on Thursday that Russia planned to “manufacture a pretext for its attack,” possibly with a “so-called terrorist bombing” or “a fake, even a real attack” with chemical weapons.
On Friday, Mr. Lavrov said blamed Ukrainian forces for “a sharp increase in shelling in eastern Ukraine,” and said that a monitoring mission led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had been obscuring evidence of Ukrainian aggression.
“The Kyiv regime has been violating its responsibilities for several years,” he said.
The United States said on Friday that Russia had likely amassed as many as 190,000 troops near the borders of Ukraine, significantly raising its estimate of Moscow’s troop buildup as the Biden administration tries to persuade the world of the imminent threat of an invasion.
The assessment was delivered in a statement by the U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, calling it “the most significant military mobilization in Europe since the Second World War.”
“We assess that Russia probably has massed between 169,000 and 190,000 personnel in and near Ukraine as compared with about 100,000 on Jan. 30,” the statement read. “This estimate includes military troops along the border, in Belarus and in occupied Crimea; Russian National Guard and other internal security units deployed to these areas; and Russian-led forces in eastern Ukraine.”
Russia has characterized the troop buildup as part of routine military exercises, including joint drills with Belarus, a friendly nation that lies along Ukraine’s northern border, close to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Those drills, which involve Russian troops from hundreds of miles to the east, are scheduled to end on Sunday.
Moscow has also announced large-scale drills in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and naval war games involving amphibious landing ships off Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, raising fears of a possible naval blockade.
The new U.S. assessment came after Ukraine called for an emergency meeting at the O.S.C.E., of which Russia is also a member, to demand Russia explain the buildup. The 57-nation body requires member states to provide prior warning of and information about certain military activities.
Russia has said the troop deployments do not meet the organization’s definition of “unusual and unscheduled military activities,” and has declined to provide answers.
U.S. estimates of Russia’s troop deployment have been rising steadily. In early January, Biden administration officials said that Russian forces numbered around 100,000. That figure grew to 130,000 in early February. Then, on Tuesday, President Biden put the number at 150,000 — with brigades typically based as far away as Siberia joining the force.
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Continue reading the main storyAs concerns grew in Europe over an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s foreign minister suggested for the first time on Friday that military action by Moscow could mean the end of Nord Stream 2, a natural-gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany.
“We in Germany are prepared to pay a high price economically. That’s why everything is on the table — also Nord Stream 2,” the minister, Annalena Baerbock, told the Munich Security Conference, the high-profile annual trans-Atlantic security gathering that is taking place from Friday to Sunday.
Ms. Baerbock’s comments departed from the German government’s public comments so far during the Ukraine crisis, which had refrained from explicitly mentioning the pipeline as part of a package of sanctions that Western countries would impose against Russia if it invades Ukraine. That has irked Germany’s allies, prompting some to question the resolve of Europe’s largest democracy to bear the cost of sanctions.
Nord Stream 2, which is not yet completed, is owned by Russia’s state-backed energy giant, Gazprom, and is a sign of Europe’s energy dependence on Russia.
It is one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in Europe today, a 746-mile pipeline stretching under the Baltic Sea from the Russian coast near St. Petersburg to Germany. The project has gone ahead in the face of opposition from the United States and most European countries.
Russia has decided not to send an official delegation to the Munich Security Conference for the first time in 20 years, which some consider a worrisome sign.
The embattled Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is expected to arrive on Saturday to seek support and solidarity, even after President Biden said on Thursday that he thought the Russians might invade Ukraine in the next few days.
Russia denies any intention of invading Ukraine, and a conference devoted to diplomacy will no doubt chew over any possibility that, in Churchill’s phrase, “Jaw-jaw might forestall war-war,” at least for now.
The American delegation to the conference, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, will include Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Mr. Blinken arrived overnight and said that he expected to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, sometime late next week, as long as Russia did not attack Ukraine.
As rockets whistled across the night sky over the front line in eastern Ukraine, Kostyantyn Reutsky, a humanitarian volunteer, said he had arrived in the town of Kondrashivka around 3 a.m. on Friday.
He was there to check on vulnerable people, including a couple, Oleksandr and Kateryna. A rocket shell hit their home on Thursday around 9 p.m. They did not sleep at all during the night, and still could not find rest amid the stress and cold.
“The roof of the house was destroyed almost completely,” he said.
The couple have nowhere to go, he said, and are now living in single room that was undamaged in the attack. They have strung up blankets at its entrance to try to keep the bitter wind from biting.
While many in the region have experienced sporadic shelling, Mr. Reutsky said there were no military facilities in this part of the village, and during all the years of the war, he was told, no shells had previously fallen there.
But the region bears the scars of years of conflict. When two schools were struck by shells on Thursday, they added to the tally of over 750 schools damaged since the conflict began in 2014, according to the U.N. children’s agency.
“Attacks on kindergartens and schools have been a sad reality for children in eastern Ukraine over the past eight years,” the agency, UNICEF, said in a statement on Friday.
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Continue reading the main storyFor weeks, as Russian troops streamed from across their vast nation to take up positions threatening Ukraine from three directions, the clearest public warning spoken by President Vladimir V. Putin came on Dec. 21.
If the West refused to accede to his sweeping demands to renegotiate the security architecture of Eastern Europe, Mr. Putin said, Russia would “take appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures and will have a tough response to their unfriendly steps.”
The phrase was repeated in a lengthy letter that Moscow sent to Washington and published on Thursday, which said that unless the United States agreed to its security demands, Russia would respond by implementing “measures of a military-technical character.”
Which raises a question: What are military-technical measures?
The phrase has a long history — even if its current usage is shrouded in the fog of the Kremlin’s opaque information campaign.
The idea of a “military-technical revolution” comes from Russian military writings of the 1980s, according to a study from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent research institute in Washington that focuses on military planning.
The term was widely used in the former Soviet Union not only to describe likely future developments in military techniques, but also to identify earlier eras when fundamental transformations of warfare had taken place.
In the current context, it is harder to divine what exactly Mr. Putin is signaling with the phrase.
Asked last month what Russia meant by military-technical means, the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, described them as weapons deployments.
Russian analysts have speculated that it could involve the deployment of modern Russian missiles that directly threaten the West — perhaps even in Latin America or on submarines off the American mainland. But the Kremlin has been deliberately vague.
“When we make decisions on this or that step, we always understand what we mean and what we are preparing for,” Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference on Jan. 14.
Greg Austin, who leads the Cyber, Space and Future Conflict Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, noted that Mr. Putin had made a distinction between “military” and “military-technical” during his Dec. 21 speech.
In an essay published this month, Mr. Austin wrote that “military-technical” could suggest actions that Russia could take without invading Ukraine. That, he wrote, includes possibilities like staging a naval blockade of the Ukrainian coast, enforcing a no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine, bombing Ukrainian weapons or missile-launch sites, or waging cyberattacks against Ukraine’s electric grid or other critical infrastructure.
In some of these cases, Mr. Austin wrote, Russia might cite similar measures taken by Western countries, such as no-fly zones enforced by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, or NATO’s bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia in 1999.
But Mr. Austin, like other observers who have tried to parse Mr. Putin’s use of the term, acknowledged that only one person knows what it means in this case: Mr. Putin himself.
At this moment of crescendo for the Ukraine crisis, it all comes down to what kind of leader President Vladimir V. Putin is.
In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great that his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff.
But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.
A large-scale invasion of Ukraine, many analysts point out, would be an enormous escalation compared with any of the actions that Mr. Putin has taken before. In 2014, the Kremlin’s subterfuge allowed Russian forces stripped of identifying markings to capture Crimea without firing a single shot. The proxy war that Mr. Putin fomented in Ukraine’s east allowed him to deny being a party to the conflict.
“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”
At home, Mr. Putin has always been keen to project the aura of a sober statesman, overruling the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.
And while he casts himself as Russia’s guarantor of stability, he could face stark economic headwinds from Western sanctions and social upheaval if there are casualties on the battlefield and among civilians.
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MUNICH — President Biden and his top aides acknowledge that they are risking American credibility as they constantly renew the alarm that Russia is only “several days” away from triggering a land war in Europe that could plunge the world back into something resembling the Cold War.
But Mr. Biden’s aides say they are willing to take that risk.
They would rather be accused of hyperbole and fearmongering than be proven right, they say, if that’s what it takes to deter President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from pursuing an invasion that they worry will not stop at Ukraine’s borders.
“If Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine, then we will be relieved that Russia changed course and proved our predictions wrong,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at the United Nations Security Council on Thursday.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken make no secret of their suspicion that their efforts to deter calamity are likely to fail. And their pessimism was reinforced Thursday by a series of escalations.
The United States’ assessment of what Mr. Putin is doing has also changed over time.
After the Russian leader issued a proposed “treaty” in December, it seemed that he had a bigger plan: to evict the United States and NATO forces from former Soviet bloc nations that have joined NATO and roll back the world order created after the Soviet collapse 31 years ago.
Then, two weeks ago, intelligence and military officials said that Mr. Putin was aiming at Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, after concluding that cyberattacks and subversion alone were unlikely to displace the government — only a full-scale invasion would do that.
So the Biden administration is trying to test Mr. Putin’s bottom line.
STANYTSIA LUHANSKA, Ukraine — The fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces has been flaring for eight years. Daily skirmishes, mostly low-level, had become routine.
But an outbreak of hostilities on Thursday, coming at a particularly perilous moment in the tense standoff between Russia and the West, brought the fear of a larger conflict close to home for this dusty remote town not far from the Russian border.
The Ukrainian military said shells fired by Russian-backed separatists in the morning had hit a kindergarten, wounding three teachers but no students, as well as the playground of a high school.
“It was a whistling sound, then an explosion,” said Tatyana Podikay, the director of the school, called Fairytale Kindergarten.
The military also said two soldiers and a woman at a bus station were wounded. There were no reported fatalities.
In the evening, the sharp cracks of explosions echoed off buildings and flashes of light from incoming artillery shells silhouetted the trees. Out on the darkened streets, explosions echoed among the buildings. At least two volleys of a half dozen rounds each struck the town, arriving with a sharp hiss before exploding. Drivers stopped their cars, got out and listened worriedly.
Each side blamed the other for the shelling, which was viewed with concern in Ukraine and in Western capitals for its potential to spiral into a bigger conflict. Analysts said the nature of the shelling, which hit multiple sites along the contact line all in a single day, was unusual compared with recent months.
“Today it was long-distance and synchronized shelling,” said Maria Zolkina, a Ukrainian political analyst who works at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation. “It was simultaneous. This is notable.”
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Continue reading the main storyIn most years, the Munich Security Conference has focused on crises far away, like those in Afghanistan or Iraq. But for this year’s gathering, which begins Friday, the topic will be Europe itself, as one of its largest nations faces a potentially catastrophic invasion.
“Our world is in danger,” Wolfgang Ischinger, the gathering’s chairman, wrote in a note before the talks. “Traditional certainties are crumbling, threats and vulnerabilities are multiplying, and the rules-based order is increasingly under attack. The need for dialogue has never been greater.”
Here are key things to know as it gets underway.
What is the conference?
The gathering, ordinarily a quiet affair in a sedate Bavarian city, brings together heads of state, diplomats and business leaders from the world’s leading democracies for three days of meetings and presentations.
This year’s event kicks off as Russia appears to be preparing for a military incursion into Ukraine, a nation on Europe’s eastern edge.
Western leaders said on Thursday that they had detected signs of a potential “false flag” operation by Russian forces to provide a pretext for a military attack. In that way, the conference could be more consequential than it has been years.
How did it begin?
When the Munich Security Conference was founded in 1963, it was envisioned as a way for leaders, mostly from the West, to discuss threats and dangers in an informal setting.
Most of the concerns at the time stemmed from the Cold War, which had dominated world politics for nearly a half-century.
Over time, the conference evolved into a platform for airing grievances and workshopping political agreements, some of them outside the realm of East-West relations.
In recent years, the conference has often invited leaders from authoritarian countries, and even adversaries, to speak.
How has Putin shaped the gathering?
One of the more searing moments of the conference came in 2007, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sharply criticized the United States and blamed it for undermining global stability behind a guise of democracy.
Mr. Putin said that a world order controlled by a single country, the United States, “has nothing in common with democracy,” and that it was time “to rethink the entire architecture of global security.”
This year, although the Russian leader is not expected to appear at the gathering, he will loom larger than ever.
Since last year, when the Russian military began massing on Ukraine’s border, Western leaders have scrambled to try to deter a Russian attack, threatening potentially crippling economic sanctions and providing Ukraine with advanced weaponry.
What can we expect this year?
All eyes will be on Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who are representing the American delegation and are expected to make vigorous defenses of Western efforts to deter a Russian attack.
Senior leaders from America’s NATO allies, including Britain, France and Germany, are also scheduled to address the conference. In recent weeks, NATO countries, including Poland and the Baltic States, have been supplying Ukraine military reinforcements to shore up Europe’s eastern flank.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who suggested this week that he might abandon his country’s effort to join NATO, will also attend.
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