US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russia was laying the groundwork to justify starting a war and preparing to launch an attack on Ukraine in the coming days, urging Moscow to change course at a tense United Nations Security Council meeting Thursday.
Blinken changed his travel plans so he could speak at Thursday’s UN meeting, where the top US diplomat said he was detailing US intelligence about Russia’s attempts to fabricate a pretext for an invasion in an attempt to “influence Russia to abandon the path of war and choose a different path while there’s still time.”
I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one,” Blinken said.
The United States says evidence at Ukraine’s border shows that Russia is “moving towards an imminent invasion” and is not withdrawing troops, despite Moscow’s claims. The comments from Blinken and other top US officials Thursday — including President Joe Biden’s blunt warning that he believed an attack would happen “within the next several days” — marked an even greater sense of urgency from the Biden administration that Russia’s actions indicated the Kremlin was moving forward with plans for war.
“Every indication that we have is that they are prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine,” Biden told reporters as he left the White House on Thursday.
Russia once again dismissed the notion it was preparing to attack Ukraine as “baseless accusations.”
In his address to the Security Council, Blinken laid out several steps the US expected Russia to take in the coming days in an attempt to justify military action in Ukraine. He said Moscow was likely to try to generate a pretext for the war, which could be a fabricated terrorist bombing inside Russia, the invented discovery of a mass grave or a staged drone strike.
“Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide, making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber do not take lightly,” Blinken said.
Blinken said that top Russian officials were likely to hold urgent meetings before an attack that would include Russian bombings across Ukraine and cyberattacks. He added that the US believes Moscow has already selected targets that Russian tanks and troops would advance on, including Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Blinken acknowledged “that some have called into question our information,” nodding to past problems with US intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War. But he said the US would be relieved if its predictions are proven incorrect and Russia changes course.
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