tonguengroover wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:00 am Lots of people saw this coming years ago but Germany was stupid.

With the Pentagon warning of a continued Russian troop buildup and possible imminent invasion of Ukraine, the leader of that country cautioned on Friday against talk of war, even as a diplomatic scramble to ease the standoff continued with no signs of a breakthrough.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that the security situation surrounding his country — where intelligence officials estimate that 130,000 Russian troops have amassed near the borders, including north of the capital, Kyiv — was not much different than at this time last year, and, while dangerous, did not necessarily mean that war was imminent or unavoidable.

A day after speaking by phone with President Biden, who reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to respond forcefully to a Russian attack, Mr. Zelensky emphasized at a news conference that he and the American president did not disagree on seriousness the Russian threat, but differed on the tone of their public comments on it.

He noted that in the past, Mr. Putin has used military buildups as a scare tactic.

“We don’t have any misunderstanding with the president, but I just deeply understand what is going on in my country, just as he understands what is going on in his country,” Mr. Zelensky said of Mr. Biden. The drumbeats of war, he added, could contribute to domestic instability and economic troubles that would heighten the risk posed by Russia.

Mr. Zelensky took issue with decisions by the United States and Britain to withdraw nonessential diplomatic staff from Ukraine, which he suggested set an unduly alarming tone. “I think it was a mistake,” he said, adding that “under these circumstances, everyone is essential.”

“I don’t think we have the Titanic here,” he said.

highdesert wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:44 am

tonguengroover wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:00 am Lots of people saw this coming years ago but Germany was stupid.

Germany has a new Social Democratic chancellor and this is his first international test as German leader. If Angela Merkel was still in power, she probably would have gotten on the phone to Putin. Merkel grew up in East Germany and speaks Russian fluently and Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany and speaks German fluently, no translators required.

Trump was against Nord Stream 2 and imposed sanctions, but Biden approved it and waived the sanctions.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 021-05-19/

TrueTexan wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 10:59 am Also how many of the Russian Forces are sitting on the Russian-Sino border or other borders and also internal areas to control population or maintain guarded areas?

highdesert wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 1:06 pm We don't know what Putin will do, he got away with taking Crimea in 2014. Putin and Xi are buddies, he's not about to invade China. But if Putin succeeds in invading and holding Ukraine, it emboldens China to invade islands in the South China Sea and maybe even Taiwan. Like the era of fascism/communism in the last century where Germany, Italy, Russia (Soviets) and Japan invaded other countries.

Putin wants to roll back to the era of the Iron Curtin where Russia had buffer states they controlled in Eastern Europe. I was listening to Gen Wesley Clark who was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, 1997-2000. He said that NATO didn't want to admit any more members in 1997, but Eastern European countries begged to be admitted. Moscow was in chaos with Yeltsin and it was their one chance to be free of the Russian Yoke before a new dictator gained power in Russia.

INVICTVS138 wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 4:35 pm I think the next thing we should watch out for is a massive DNS cyber attack in Ukraine. That will be a precursor to invasion.

However, I do agree that the only person who has any insight on what Putin will or won’t do is Putin…

sikacz wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 6:25 pm I wouldn’t put cyber attacks on us and our allies out of the question if war is about to break out.

The US has seen indications that Russia has positioned supplies of blood near Ukraine's borders, two senior US defense officials told CNN Saturday, as part of its accumulation of medical supplies, troops and military equipment in the area that US officials have said could signal plans for an invasion.

Reuters was first to report Russia's movement of blood supplies to the border with Ukraine, which would be necessary to treat casualties in the event of a conflict. The development has added to US concerns that Russia has the capabilities in place to launch an attack on very short notice.

One of the officials who spoke with CNN cautioned that the presence of Russian blood supplies near the Ukrainian border is not an absolute indicator of an invasion. Instead, it is one element among many the US is monitoring as the build-up of Russian forces steadily proceeds.

CNN reported last month that Russia had begun erecting supply lines such as medical units and fuel that could sustain a drawn-out conflict should Moscow choose to invade.

Ukraine has denied that Russia has moved any blood supplies to the front lines. On Saturday, Ukraine's Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar called the reports "not true."

"This information is not true," she said in a statement on Facebook. "Such 'news' is an element of information and psychological warfare. The purpose of such information is to spread panic and fear in our society."

CNN reported on Friday that tension has been building between Zelensky and Biden administration officials, amid a disagreement over how to interpret and publicly communicate US intelligence assessments that say Russia could be preparing a large-scale attack on Ukraine.

While White House press secretary Jen Psaki has warned that the administration believes a war is "imminent," Zelensky told reporters on Friday, "There is a feeling abroad that there is war here. That's not the case." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Saturday spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart Lt. Gen. Valery Zaluzhny for the fourth time this month -- a sign of the ongoing outreach to Ukraine and NATO allies -- one day after warning of "terrible" and "horrific" consequences if Russia chose to invade the country.

Milley and Zaluzhny exchanged assessments of the security situation facing Ukraine, according to a readout of the call. Milley underscored US support for an independent Ukraine. He has also spoken in recent days with many of his NATO counterparts.

President Joe Biden said Friday that he will move US troops to NATO allies in Eastern Europe in the "near term," marking a new phase in the US response to Russia's escalation on the Ukrainian border, which US officials fear could soon lead to an invasion.

"I will be moving US troops to Eastern Europe in NATO countries in the near term," Biden told reporters when asked about a timeline for moving the troops, adding that he did not have any updates on the situation in Ukraine.

As many as 8,500 US troops had been placed on heightened alert earlier this week to prepare to deploy to Eastern Europe -- including units with "medical support, aviation support, logistical support" and "combat formation," according to a Pentagon spokesman.

Biden's comments come hours after the top US military general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, warned a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be "horrific" for the country and would result in "significant" casualties as he urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to choose a diplomatic path instead.

"Given the type of forces that are arrayed ... if that was unleashed on Ukraine, it would be significant, very significant, and it would result in a significant amount of casualties," Milley said at a Pentagon press briefing Friday. "You can imagine what that might look like in dense urban areas, along roads, and so on and so forth. It would be horrific. It would be terrible. And it's not necessary. And we think a diplomatic outcome is the way to go here."

Milley, who along with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin briefed reporters Friday on the US military's preparations, spoke of Ukraine's geography, noting that when its "high water table" freezes, "it makes it for optimal conditions for cross-country tract and wheeled vehicle maneuver."

The United States requested a United Nations Security Council meeting Monday on Ukraine, which it sees as an opportunity for Russia "to explain its extraordinary military buildup on Ukraine's borders and its other threats and destabilizing acts," the senior administration official said Friday.

"While I do think there will be some deflection and perhaps some disinformation -- we know that playbook -- but there's also a clear opportunity for Russia to tell the Security Council whether they see a path for diplomacy or are interested in pursuing conflict," the official said. "And I also think this will be an opportunity -- and will be very important -- for Russia to hear the position that other council members take on these fundamental principles of the international order."

"We hope and expect that our council colleagues will express their desire to pursue a path of diplomacy rather than the path of war," the official said.

The official said the US felt "it would be a dereliction of the Security Council's duties to take a wait and see approach," and said US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield will "present the facts of the case and clearly articulate what's at stake for European and global peace and security."
There is no statement or Council action expected from the meeting.

A second official said the US Mission to the UN has been actively engaged with others in New York, including Ukraine, other European nations including Germany, China and Russia.

"We've been in very active dialogue with China, obviously about range of issues, but also, in particular, this situation, Russia and Ukraine," they said. "We've been an active diplomatic conversation with the Chinese mission in New York about this meeting and the issue as it comes to the Security Council as well."

The United States and Russia engaged in a diplomatic brawl Monday at the U.N. Security Council over the Ukraine crisis, as the Americans accused the Russians of endangering peace by massing troops on Ukraine’s borders while Kremlin diplomats dismissed what they called farcical theatrics and fearmongering.

The meeting of the 15-nation council, requested by the United States last week, represented the highest-profile arena for the two powers to sway world opinion over Ukraine.

The tensions surrounding the former Soviet republic — smoldering since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula nearly eight years ago, and escalating sharply in recent months — have brought U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point since the Cold War. The meeting adjourned, as expected, with no action taken.

Almost immediately after the meeting of the council convened, the Russians lost a procedural challenge to even holding it. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia of Russia accused the Americans of fomenting “unfounded accusations that we have refuted” and said no Russian troops were in Ukraine, questioning the basic premise of a meeting he described as “megaphone diplomacy.”

The American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, countered that many private diplomatic meetings had been held about Russia’s military buildup and it was “now time to have a meeting in public.” She asked other members how they would feel “if you had 100,000 troops sitting on your border.”

The council voted to proceed with the meeting, with only Russia and China objecting. Although Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are all veto-wielding permanent members of the council, veto power cannot be used to block a meeting.

“The situation we are facing in Europe is urgent and dangerous,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said in her opening remarks. “Russia’s actions strike at the very heart of the U.N. charter.”

The Russian military buildup, she said, reflected “an escalation in a pattern of aggression that we’ve seen from Russia again and again.” While she emphasized American desires for a peaceful outcome, Mrs. Thomas-Greenfield said that if the Russians invaded Ukraine, “none of us will be able to say we didn’t see it coming.”

Mr. Nebenzia, in his remarks, said Russia wanted peace and that the United States and its Western allies had manufactured a nonexistent crisis to drive a wedge between Russia and Ukraine.

He accused his American counterpart of making a “hodgepodge of accusations but no specific facts.” He drew an analogy to the false American evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that preceded the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, adding that “what happened to that country is known to all.”

Mr. Nebenzia’s remarks reinforced a message that other Kremlin diplomats have sought to project: that the Security Council meeting was a manufactured contretemps over what they call unjustified Western fears, instigated by the United States, that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. The Russians have also seized on complaints by Ukraine’s president and others that the Americans are needlessly sowing panic.

Mr. Putin, who has not spoken publicly about Ukraine since December, maintained his silence.

His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday that Mr. Putin would state his views on the situation “as soon as he determines it to be necessary.”

“I can’t give you an exact date,” Mr. Peskov said. Russian officials continued to maintain they were not at fault for the rising tensions, insisting that the United States was fabricating the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That was a rare point of common ground with Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has also blamed the United States for needlessly sowing “panic” in Ukraine.

Russia has sent more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in recent weeks, part of an increasingly aggressive posture by Mr. Putin to protect and enlarge what he sees as Russia’s rightful sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The Pentagon said on Friday that Russia had amassed enough forces to stage a full-scale invasion of Ukraine at a time of its choosing.

The Kremlin has accused the NATO alliance of threatening Russia and has demanded that it never admit Ukraine as a member. The possibility of a diplomatic solution has remained unclear at best.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, will have a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, but there are no plans at the moment to arrange an in-person meeting, Maria V. Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the ministry, said on Monday.

The Biden administration has said it wants a peaceful outcome to the crisis but is preparing for the possibility of what American military commanders have said would be a devastating armed conflict in Ukraine. The administration has vowed to respond with crippling economic sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will speak in a phone call on Monday, a day before Mr. Johnson makes a visit to Ukraine as his government attempts to defuse the escalating crisis with both diplomacy and deterrents.

Britain will propose legislation this week to let ministers impose a wider range of sanctions on Russia in the event of a new invasion of Ukraine, the British foreign secretary said on Sunday.

The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, discussed the plan in an interview with the broadcaster Sky News, presenting it as part of a broad range of efforts to deter further aggression from Mr. Putin. Britain is already supplying defensive weapons to Ukraine and has offered to increase its troop deployments elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The offer to bolster troops was designed to “signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, said on Monday during a visit to Hungary.

The new legislation would seek to broaden Britain’s current sanctions so there would be “nowhere to hide” for oligarchs and “any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia,” Ms. Truss said.

Britain has long been a financial hub for Russia’s wealthy and well-connected, with one British parliamentary report describing London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian money.

While the British Parliament typically takes weeks or months to pass a bill, emergency procedures allow it to legislate in as little as a day under some circumstances.

The call between the British and Russian leaders comes at a crucial moment for Mr. Johnson, whose political future remains uncertain after weeks of media reports that parties were hosted at Downing Street when the rest of the country was under lockdown restrictions.

Mr. Johnson’s visit to Ukraine on Tuesday will happen a day after a potentially explosive British government investigation into those reports was delivered to the prime minister.

A bomb is about to go off.

Callers have communicated some variation of those words to the police in Ukraine at least 300 times in the past month, a spate of fake bomb threats that officials say is designed to sow panic and fear.

With tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s borders and the West warning that war could break out any day, the bomb threats have added to the growing sense of anxiety in the nation of 44 million.

While the Pentagon warned on Friday that Russia had now amassed enough troops to launch a full-scale invasion of the country, analysts have said that Russian aggression aimed at destabilizing the government could come in many forms. And it is the collapse of the state from within — abetted by Russian efforts — that Ukrainian officials have called the most clear and present danger.

The rate of bomb threats in January in Ukraine was six times higher than the average for last year.

The Ukrainian police say they have checked more than 3,000 buildings since the beginning of January in response to more than 300 phoned-in bomb threats. So far the threats have all turned out to be fake — causing disruption but no damage or loss of life.

In a statement, the country’s security service said the goal was obvious: creating chaos, stirring fear and undermining the government.

The threats have been mostly aimed at schools and shopping malls, forcing evacuations and closures and in some cases keeping children out of classes for days.

Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, wrote on social media that the fake bomb alerts were mostly coming from Russia, from Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine and from Russian allies, including Belarus.

The threats come as Ukraine braces for more cyberattacks — which could range from efforts to cripple the country’s infrastructure to propaganda campaigns aimed at sowing fear and confusion.

A Ukrainian government website was recently hacked and a message was posted: “Be afraid and expect the worst.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly expressed his concern that internal destabilization poses perhaps an even greater danger than an invasion. Panic, he has said, puts the economy in danger.

It is this concern that prompted him to publicly call on the United States and other European leaders to cool their talk of war being imminent. At the same time, he has blamed Russia for the bomb threats and efforts to cause turmoil within Ukraine.

“Why are you doing this?” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in comments directed at Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, in which he mentioned both the military buildup at the border and the flurry of bomb threats. “To threaten us? What is this sadomasochism? What is the pleasure of this? Of someone being afraid?”

Russian officials have repeatedly denied meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs. And they say they have also been dealing with their own wave of bomb threats, which have forced Russian schools and shopping centers to evacuate tens of thousands of people. They have blamed Ukraine for the surge.

In Ukraine, the fake bomb alerts have disrupted classes at dozens of schools, and some Ukrainians are blaming the government for the problem.

“It’s getting scary,” said Anastasia Kuznetsova, a parent in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine. Her 9-year-old daughter could not go to school for nearly two weeks this month because of repeated bomb threats to the building.

Olena Ronzhyna, mother of a 12-year-old from Cherkasy, in central Ukraine, said people were upset and blaming the government.

“Children have been home for almost a month,” she said.

Yet Ms. Ronzhyna believes that if Russia is hoping to damage Ukraine by undermining trust in its government, it will not work. Ukrainians have always taken great pride in their deep distrust of their government, and they relish criticizing it harshly and openly.

“We never trust any of our governments,” she said. “Starting from the first day after an election.”

For centuries, Ukraine’s long struggle for statehood has been mirrored by the often troubled fate of the Ukrainian language. Oppressed and marginalized throughout the Czarist and Soviet eras, Ukrainian finally shed its second-class status in 1991 to become the official state language of newly independent Ukraine. However, the story did not end there.

Despite the upgrade of Ukrainian following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the language has continued to play second fiddle to Russian throughout much of the country and in many aspects of everyday life. Ever since the 1990s, efforts to regulate and promote the use of Ukrainian in place of Russian have proved politically explosive and have come to symbolize independent Ukraine’s post-Soviet identity crisis. Meanwhile, the national debate on the language issue has reflected lingering divisions within Ukrainian society over attitudes towards the dominant role played by Russia in the country’s past.

This politicization of language does not reflect the day-to-day reality of bilingual Ukraine, where both Russian and Ukrainian are commonly spoken and widely understood across the country. Russian remains in the ascendancy in most Ukrainian cities, while Ukrainian tends to dominate in rural Ukraine and across the formerly Hapsburg lands of the west, but the linguistic fluidity of the country is such that it is not uncommon to hear both languages spoken in a single conversation.

This pragmatism has not prevented Russia and Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin political parties from masterfully exploiting the language issue. Since the early 2000s, Russian-speaking Ukrainians have been actively encouraged to think of themselves as a distinct and oppressed minority. This messaging reached a crescendo during the Kremlin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent “Russian Spring” campaign throughout southern and eastern Ukraine. It has remained at the heart of Russia’s ongoing hybrid war against Ukraine ever since, with the need to defend Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population repeatedly cited by the Kremlin media and Vladimir Putin himself.

The prominent role played by Russian-speaking Ukrainians in repelling Putin’s hybrid invasion has done much to alter perceptions of language and identity in today’s Ukraine, leading to the rise of a civic national identity that goes beyond the narrow confines of language and ethnicity. Many saw the election of Jewish Russian-speaker Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s sixth president in 2019 as further confirmation of the country’s evolving linguistic politics.

Ukraine knows from decades of painful experience that the language issue ranks among Russia’s favorite destabilization tools. There are growing indications that the country’s Kremlin-friendly forces are once again preparing to use it as a rallying cry. Putin’s closest personal ally in Ukraine, opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk, recently published an op-ed calling for an end to “forced Ukrainization” and “anti-Russian hysteria” while arguing that greater rights for Russian-speaking Ukrainians could play a decisive role in winning back the largely Russian-speaking population of Kremlin-occupied eastern Ukraine.

Medvedchuk’s arguments may seem persuasive to President Zelenskyy as he struggles to make good on his election promises of bringing peace and national unity to the country. However, any concessions that boost the Russian language at the expense of Ukrainian would pose a very real threat to the country’s future sovereignty.

The past six years of Russian hybrid warfare have made Kremlin attitudes towards the language issue crystal clear, and have only served to underline the importance of safeguarding the status of Ukrainian. Polls indicate that most Ukrainians recognize this, but incidents like June’s McDonald’s menu debacle reflect continued vulnerability to linguistic provocations. Zelenskyy wishes to enter Ukrainian history as a unifying figure who transcends linguistic boundaries, but he must trend carefully. If a new language war breaks out in Ukraine, the only winner will be Vladimir Putin.