The White House rejected comparisons between Afghanistan and Ukraine after national security adviser Jake Sullivan urged Americans in Ukraine to leave within the next 24 to 48 hours.
A reporter pointed out that this was the second exhortation from the Biden administration to evacuate.
“We are not ending a 20-year war. We are trying to prevent a war,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Friday.
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There are “significant differences between these different scenarios,” according to Psaki, referring to the chaos that ensued in Afghanistan after the Taliban captured Kabul quicker than expected, roiling evacuation efforts.
“We are trying to keep American citizens safe in Ukraine by encouraging them to depart by providing them information about what the security circumstances are on the ground,” she said.
Earlier in the briefing, Sullivan warned there was “a credible prospect” that Russian President Vladimir Putin would take military action against Ukraine before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics end on Feb. 20.
Sullivan declined to specify what is causing the White House’s alarm, only that the administration had “a sufficient level of concern based on what we are seeing on the ground.” One possible attack could be a “rapid assault on the city of Kyiv, according to Sullivan.
“The risk is now high enough, the threat is now immediate enough that this is what prudence demands,” he said.
“The president will not be putting the lives of our men and women in uniform at risk by sending them into a war zone to rescue people who could have left now but chose not to, so we are asking people to make the responsible choice,” he added.
Sullivan was also asked about comparisons between Ukraine and another conflict, in his case Iraq.
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“In the situation in Iraq, intelligence was used and deployed from this very podium to start a war. We are trying to stop a war, to prevent a war, to avert a war,” he said.
