Live Updates: Ukraine Warns of New Military Activity in the East
Military drills by Russia-backed separatists fueled concerns that Moscow was readying to attack, as President Biden held a call with an array of NATO and European Union leaders.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s military warned on Friday that Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east are conducting military exercises, completing a near encirclement of Ukraine by hostile forces.
The drills tested the force’s preparation for live-fire operations, driving “artillery, tank and armored vehicles” in field exercises, the Ukrainian statement said. The statement said some units of the force were put on their highest level of alert, and that senior Russian military officers were observing the activity.
The warning was the latest evidence of a shift by Kyiv to more alarming commentary about the risks of a further invasion by Russia, which has massed what U.S. officials estimate is 130,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders. That follows weeks of efforts to minimize the threat of an attack, seeking to calm the public and limit economic fallout.
Ukraine this week began its own nationwide military exercises to coincide with joint Russian and Belarusian exercises to the north of Ukraine, in Belarus.
To the south, the Russian Navy announced on Thursday the closure of large swaths of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov for live-fire exercises by its fleet that will effectively blockade Ukrainian ports. Russia has massed armored vehicles and soldiers near its borders to the northeast of Ukraine and in the south on the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
200 MILES
Moscow
BELARUS
POLAND
RUSSIA
Border with Russian units
Kyiv
KAZAKHSTAN
UKRAINE
MOLDOVA
Russian units
ROMANIA
SEA OF
AZOV
CRIMEA
BULGARIA
BLACK SEA
Transnistria, a
Russian-backed
breakaway region
of Moldova.
Russia invaded and
annexed the Crimean
Peninsula from
Ukraine in 2014.
Approximate line
separating Ukrainian and
Russian-backed forces near
two breakaway provinces.
300 MILES
Moscow
RUSSIA
BELARUS
Border with
Russian units
Kyiv
UKRAINE
Russian
units
CRIMEA
BLACK SEA
Russia annexed
the Crimean
Peninsula from
Ukraine in 2014.
Transnistria, a
Russian-backed
breakaway region
of Moldova.
Approximate line
separating Ukrainian
and Russian-backed
forces.
To the east, the army of Russian-backed separatists in two enclaves in eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk peoples’ republics, was put on partial alert and ordered to conduct field exercises, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said Friday in a statement.
Ukraine and Western governments view the separatist army, believed to consist of about 30,000 troops, as controlled and armed by the Russian government. Russian officials have consistently denied any Russian role in the conflict.
A wide range of diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis have borne little fruit to date. On Friday, President Biden was holding a phone call with trans-Atlantic leaders, including those from the European Union, NATO, France, Germany and Britain.
In news conferences that extended after midnight in Berlin, both Russian and Ukrainian negotiators said a channel of talks supported by President Emmanuel Macron of France had brought no breakthroughs so far.
President Biden is holding a phone conference on Friday with a wide array of NATO and European Union leaders to discuss what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in Ukraine.
The White House said that the call, which was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. in Washington, would include Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany; Prime Ministers Boris Johnson of Britain, Mario Draghi of Italy and Justin Trudeau of Canada; and Presidents Emmanuel Macron of France, Andrzej Duda of Poland, Klaus Iohannis of Romania, Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission and Charles Michel of the European Council; and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.
Mr. Biden did not have a news conference scheduled on Friday, but White House officials said that the call would be discussed by his aides at an afternoon press briefing. In a statement, the White House said that the leaders would discuss “continued coordination on both diplomacy and deterrence.”
The call comes as Russia builds up its forces around Ukraine — in Belarus, western Russia and Crimea, the territory Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014 — in what U.S. and NATO leaders have said appears to be preparation for an invasion. Ukraine said on Friday that Russian-backed separatists were holding military exercises in the slice of eastern Ukraine they control, at the same time that Russia holds exercises near Ukraine.
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Continue reading the main storySatellite images collected on Wednesday and Thursday reveal new deployment and positioning of Russian military equipment and troops in multiple locations around Ukraine, including Crimea, western Russia and Belarus, adding to an already ominous buildup that has fueled invasion fears.
The new imagery, released by a Colorado-based space technology company, Maxar Technologies, shows new or additional deployments in three locations in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. Those deployments include troops, vehicles and other equipment in Novoozernoye and Slavne near the western coast, and more than 550 new tents for troops and hundreds of vehicles at a disused airfield in Oktyabrskoe, near the center of the peninsula.
The satellite images also show additional military assets were moved to the Kursk area in western Russia. That puts them near the strategic city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest, which has a large Russian-speaking population.
Russia is also conducting naval exercises in the Black Sea and the adjoining Sea of Azov. Ukraine strongly criticized the naval maneuvers on Thursday, with the defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, claiming on Twitter that Russia was blocking international waters.
For weeks, Russia has been sending military forces into Belarus, saying the deployment was for joint military drills, including units near Ukraine’s northern border. The exercises began on Thursday and are scheduled to continue for 10 days.
Satellite imagery also shows the arrival of new troops and equipment at the Zyabrovka airfield in Belarus, 14 miles from the Ukraine border. The area showed little activity until the end of January, according to analysis of radar imagery by The New York Times, but the satellite images released on Thursday show the airfield bustling with helicopters, vehicles, troop housing and field hospitals.
The images suggest that Russia has increased its military readiness in the region. That would allow Russia to mount an offensive on short notice should President Vladimir V. Putin decide to do so.
U.S. and NATO officials have said that Mr. Putin appears to be preparing for a full-fledged invasion. Russia continues to dismiss that suggestion, insisting that all troop and equipment movements are for ordinary exercises.
WASHINGTON — President Biden delivered his starkest warning yet that Americans should leave Ukraine, saying that U.S. troops would not be dispatched to retrieve them should Russia invade.
“American citizens should leave, should leave now,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that aired on Thursday evening, adding that there was no scenario that could prompt him to send troops to rescue Americans. “We’re dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. This is a very different situation, and things could go crazy quickly.”
“That’s a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another,” Mr. Biden added. “We’re in a very different world than we’ve ever been in.”
Mr. Biden’s comments followed a string of increasingly urgent warnings for U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine as thousands of Russian troops have amassed on its borders.
The State Department said on Thursday that “military action may commence at any time and without warning,” as it reissued an advisory urging Americans not to travel to Ukraine with its starkest language yet. A military incursion would also “severely impact” the U.S. Embassy’s ability to help Americans leave Ukraine, the department said. In October, Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, estimated that about 6,600 U.S. citizens were living in Ukraine.
Mr. Biden had previously made clear that he had no intention of sending American troops to defend Ukraine, stating pointedly in early December that the military option was “not on the table.”
Officials have stressed that U.S. intelligence analysts still do not think Mr. Putin has yet decided whether to invade.
“I’m hoping that if, in fact, he’s foolish enough to go in, he’s smart enough not to, in fact, do anything that would negatively impact on American citizens,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday.
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Talks Between Russia and Britain Over Ukraine Remain at an Impasse
Russia’s top diplomat dismissed talks with his British counterpart as unproductive.
I can’t see any other reason for having 100,000 troops stationed on the Ukrainian border apart from to threaten Ukraine. And if Russia is serious about diplomacy, they need to move those troops and desist from the threats. I listened to what Foreign Minister Lavrov has to say. I think there are further talks to be had. NATO has put proposals on the table to improve transparency, to improve confidence, and I want us to take those talks forward.
MOSCOW — The Western diplomatic push to defuse the Ukraine crisis ground on in Moscow on Thursday with dim prospects of success, as Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia dismissed criticism of his country’s conduct as farcical and a meeting with his British counterpart as fruitless.
“I am honestly disappointed that we’re having the conversation of a mute person with a deaf person,” Mr. Lavrov said after meeting for two hours with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss of Britain. “It’s as though we are hearing each other, but not listening.”
A joint news conference by Mr. Lavrov and Ms. Truss after they met at a Russian Foreign Ministry villa in central Moscow offered a stark display of the clashing worldviews that have made the crisis over Ukraine appear nearly impossible to resolve.
While President Emmanuel Macron of France sought to strike a constructive tone after meeting on Monday with President Vladimir V. Putin for five hours in Moscow, little optimism emerged from Ms. Truss’s hastily scheduled visit.
Ms. Truss reiterated Western warnings that an invasion of Ukraine would result in “a prolonged and drawn-out conflict,” and said that Russia needed to pull back the 130,000 troops that U.S. officials estimated it had massed near Ukraine’s borders.
Mr. Lavrov countered by repeating the Russian government’s contention that it was not threatening anyone, and therefore had no reason to de-escalate.
“You first have to prove to me that we are the ones who created this tense situation,” Mr. Lavrov said, rejecting the idea of a Russian invasion. “The West is trying to make a tragedy out of this, while, increasingly, it’s similar to a comedy.”
Ms. Truss insisted that the facts of the Russian troop buildup — which continued on Thursday with the start of joint military exercises in allied Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor — spoke for themselves. Her direct language was evidence of the relatively hard line that Britain has struck in the current crisis — declassifying intelligence alleging Russian plans for a coup, for example, and providing Ukraine with antitank weaponry.
“There is no doubt that the stationing of over 100,000 troops is directly put in place to threaten Ukraine,” said Ms. Truss, who was making the first visit to Moscow by a British foreign secretary in more than four years. “If Russia is serious about diplomacy, they need to move those troops.”
Ukraine’s government said planned Russian naval drills off Ukraine’s southern coast were “an abuse of international law” by the Kremlin “in order to achieve its own geopolitical goals’’ and it called on other countries to bar Russian ships from their ports.
Mr. Putin said Russia was preparing written responses in its back-and-forth with the United States and NATO, and added that he was planning to speak by phone again in the coming days with Mr. Macron.
Mr. Putin has kept the world guessing at his intentions, signaling that he is open to continued negotiations over his demands for a reshaping of Europe’s security architecture, while hinting at the prospect of an all-out war with the West.
But Mr. Lavrov said that any Russian threats to Ukraine were made up — a denial-of-reality approach that echoed Russia’s refusals to acknowledge its military backing for separatists in eastern Ukraine or its interference in the 2016 American elections. Mr. Lavrov even professed that Russia was so concerned about Western embassies drawing down their personnel in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, that Russia was planning to do so as well.
“We’ve started to think that maybe the Anglo-Saxons are preparing something,” Mr. Lavrov said, standing next to Ms. Truss. “If they are evacuating their employees, we will probably also recommend that nonessential personnel of our diplomatic establishments temporarily go home.”
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