FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON. “I believe Putin has decided to invade Ukraine.” Joe Biden for the first time throws the most extreme hypothesis on the table and says that the offensive will take place “in the next few days” on the strength of a Pentagon report that stresses that “at least 40% of the battalions on the border with Ukraine are in attack position “. The target of the attack is, Biden said, the capital city of Kiev.
However, the space for diplomacy is still there and it will be up to Putin to choose that option, highlights the American president speaking from the Roosevelt Room after having had a 45-minute videoconference confrontation with European and NATO allies. The path of dialogue therefore remains open for Washington, which however confirms that the Western front is compact, “despite Russian efforts to divide it”, in acting with “economic measures against Russia should it open a conflict” in Ukraine. The meeting between Blinken and Lavrov in the European Championship next Thursday testifies to the willingness to keep the channels open with Moscow.
The White House has also tried to clear the field of disputes over sanctions and Daleep Singh, number two of the National Security Council, said that “the allies are converging on the package of sanctions”. Clearly, details are still missing, but Singh wanted to reassure the allies by pointing out that “the sanctions are not aimed at reducing Russia’s capacity as a supplier of gas to the world“. This is an important clarification that comes after the distinctions made by Draghi on the proportionality of the measures. Nor should there be a squeeze on the banking system with the blocking of membership of the Swift circuit, Singh specified, saying that in any case the package will make Russia “a pariah on the international scene”.
Meanwhile, today’s meeting between Kamala Harris and Volodimyr Zelensky is likely to be skipped at the Munich Security Conference. The Ukrainian president is in fact at home and has made it known that he may not go to Germany. “It depends on him, whatever he does has the support of America,” said Jen Psaki, trying to immediately defuse a controversy linked to the irritation that the Ukrainian number one has expressed at the repeated US alarms about the imminence of an attack.
While Antony Blinken, also in Munich, expresses concern “that Russia has taken a path other than diplomatic”, continuous reports of ceasefire violations arrive from the Donbass – over 50 have been counted in less than 24 hours including a car bomb explosion in the heart of Donetsk – and fears that Russia is building a pretext to start a military operation in Ukraine are mounting. Washington now reads almost all Russian moves with this lens and defines the evacuation of civilians from Kiev ordered by Moscow “a cynical operation”. Blinken is convinced that “everything you see is part of the scenario to build a provocation”. And even Biden in his brief speech underlined how Moscow works to create false pretexts by also spreading “fake news” – such as the one on the genocide of pro-Russians in Donbass – to fuel the war drums.
Three days after the blackout that hit the Kiev defense ministry and the banking system, Washington yesterday pointed the finger at Russia for the first time. “We believe Russian military intelligence is behind the attacks,” said Anne Neuberger, Deputy Advisor for Homeland Security: “There was an anomalous flow of communications between the centers managed by the GRU and domains with IP addresses based in Ukraine” .
These are signs that, combined with the military build-up, reinforce the conviction of the US intelligence that foresees “within a few days an attack prepared on false provocations”. Yesterday the US Ambassador to the OSCE, Michael Carpenter, bothered the story to explain the gravity of what is happening on the borders of Ukraine where there are between “169 thousand and 190 thousand men” against 100 thousand on January 30: ” It is the largest mobilization in Europe since the Second World War, ”said Biden’s envoy. It is not just the massive numbers that alert the allies, but the type of deployment. Pentagon Secretary Floyd Austin noted that elements of military logistics, which are valuable in the logistics chain in preparation for an invasion, are also increasing. Satellite images framed 50 attack helicopters at the Lida base in Belarus.