Russia makes excuses for invading Ukraine – Orange County Register

By AAMER MADHANI, NOMAAN MERCHANT and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

According to the White House Housing.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday intelligence findings suggest Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign that views Ukraine as an aggressor preparing suffered an imminent attack on Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

Psaki alleges that Russia has sent special forces trained in urban warfare who can use explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxies – blaming the action on Ukraine – if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides he wants to launch an invasion.

“We are concerned that the Russian government is preparing for an invasion of Ukraine that could lead to human rights violations and widespread war crimes if diplomacy fails to achieve their goals,” Psaki said.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby described the intelligence as “very reliable.” One US official, who was not authorized to comment on intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity, said much of the information was gathered from intercepted communications and observing people’s movements.

The US intelligence findings, declassified and shared with US allies before being made public, estimate that a military invasion could begin between mid-January and mid-February.

Ukraine is also monitoring Russia’s potential use of disinformation. Separately, Ukrainian media reported on Friday that authorities believe Russian special services are planning a possible false flag planting to incite further conflict.

The new US intelligence was revealed after a series of talks between Russia and the United States and its Western allies this week in Europe aimed at preventing the crisis from escalating made little progress.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Thursday that the US intelligence community has not yet assessed that the Russians, who have deployed about 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, have decisively decided to take an action. military action.

However, Mr. Sullivan said Russia is laying the groundwork to invade under false pretexts if Putin decides to go that route. He said the Russians had been planning “disinformation and sabotage operations” accusing Ukraine of preparing their own imminent attack on Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

He said this is similar to what the Kremlin did before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the peninsula in the Black Sea has been under Ukraine’s jurisdiction since 1954.

The Crimea crisis comes at a time when Ukraine is looking to strengthen ties with the West. Russia has ramped up propaganda that ethnic Russians in Ukraine are being oppressed in eastern Ukraine.

Russia has long been accused of using disinformation as a tactic against its enemies in conjunction with military operations and cyberattacks. In 2014, Russian state media attempted to discredit the pro-Western protests in Kyiv as “incentivized by the United States to cooperate with fascist Ukrainian nationalists” and promote anti-Western protests. reports on Crimea’s historical ties to Moscow, according to a report by the Stanford University Internet Observatory.

Attempts to directly influence Ukrainians appear to continue in the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, in which at least 14,000 people have been killed. The AP news agency reported in 2017 that Ukrainian forces in the east were constantly receiving text messages warning that they would be killed and their children would be orphaned.

Nina Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Washington-based Wilson Center, said Russia’s disinformation efforts have evolved from before the annexation of Crimea to the present. Jankowicz, author of the book “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,” said this time the Kremlin appears to be promoting anti-Ukrainian news articles with officials top organizations make public statements.

“Officials are creating the sound for the state media and they are just working on it,” she said.

So-called “troll farms” that post fake comments have less influence in part because social media companies have been better at stopping them, she said. Russia’s efforts on social media are often based on existing doubts in Ukrainian society about whether the US will support Ukraine in a conflict and whether the West can be trusted, she said. .

The US intelligence community has noted that Russian influencers build on social media to justify the intervention by highlighting the deteriorating human rights in Ukraine, showing the rise of militarism by political actors. Ukraine’s leader and blamed the West for escalating tensions.

“We saw this book in 2014,” Sullivan told reporters Thursday. “They are preparing this play again.”

The Russians, while maintaining their plans to invade Ukraine, are demanding written guarantees from the US and NATO that the alliance will not expand eastward. The US made the request immediately but said it was ready to negotiate with Moscow about the possibility of future offensive missile deployments in Ukraine and put limits on US and NATO military exercises. in Eastern Europe.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday warned that Moscow would not wait indefinitely for a Western response, saying he hoped the United States and NATO would give a written answer next week.

Foreign Minister Lavrov described Moscow’s demand for binding guarantees that NATO would not encircle Ukraine or any other former Soviet state, or station its forces and weapons there, as necessary for the progress of diplomatic efforts to defuse rising tensions over Ukraine.

He said that NATO’s deployment and exercises near Russia’s borders pose security challenges that need to be resolved immediately.

“We have run out of patience,” Lavrov told a news conference. “The West has been driven by arrogance and has exacerbated tensions by violating its obligations and common sense.”

Isachenkov reported from Moscow. AP National Security columnist Robert Burns contributed reporting.

https://www.ocregister.com/2022/01/14/white-house-russia-prepping-pretext-for-ukraine-invasion/ Russia makes excuses for invading Ukraine – Orange County Register

Huynh Nguyen

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