The Biden administration on Friday escalated its dire warnings about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying it could take place within days, even as diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis continued. The White House said it still didn’t know if Russian President Vladimir Putin had made a decision to invade, but it said Putin has assembled all the elements to do so quickly and told Americans in Ukraine to leave within the next 48 hours. The stark warning accelerated the projected timeframe for a potential invasion, which many analysts believed was unlikely to start until after the Winter Olympics in China end on Feb. 20. The heightened U.S. rhetoric followed new intelligence that showed another increase in Russian troops near the Ukrainian border and the start of a major Russian military exercise in neighboring Belarus. “We can’t pinpoint the day at this point, and we can’t pinpoint the hour, but that is a very, very distinct possibility,” President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said. ”The strong possibility of action, the distinct possibility of action, in a relatively near term time frame … is backed up by our view of what’s happening on the ground.” “We continue to see signs of Russian escalation, including new forces arriving at the Ukrainian border,” he added, ramping up the urgency of earlier U.S. warnings. “As we’ve said before, we are in the window when an invasion could begin at any time should Vladimir Putin decide to order it.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is currently in Australia, was the first senior U.S. official to say publicly that an invasion could come before the end of the Olympics. Repeating Blinken’s earlier caution to U.S. citizens in Ukraine, Sullivan said: “The risk is high enough and the threat is now immediate enough that prudence demands that it is the time to leave now.” Sullivan would not discuss the details of the intelligence behind the new U.S. assessment and denied a report that American officials believe Putin has made the decision to invade. But he said the situation is increasingly fragile and that the U.S. and its allies must be prepared. “We believe he very well may give the final ‘go order’,” Sullivan said. “That is a very distinct possibility. It may well happen soon.” Biden spoke to a number of European leaders on Friday to underscore the concerns raised by U.S. intelligence about the potential imminence of a Russian invasion. Sullivan said the Western leaders were completely united and would respond harshly to a Russian invasion with devastating economic and trade sanctions. Britain’s defense secretary, meanwhile, was visiting Moscow in another effort to ease tensions over a possible invasion. Ben Wallace’s trip came a day after British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss held frosty negotiations in Moscow to urge Russia to pull back over 100,000 troops near Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov characterized that meeting in blunt and scathing terms, calling it a “conversation between deaf and dumb.” Russia opened massive war games in Belarus on Thursday that are due to run through next weekend but says it has no plans to invade Ukraine. It wants the West to keep Ukraine and other former Soviet countries out of NATO. It also wants NATO to refrain from deploying weapons there and to roll […]
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