Russian military forces are “moving toward an imminent invasion” of Ukraine, prompting Secretary of State Antony Blinken to make an emergency appearance before the United Nations Security Council.
“The evidence on the ground is that Russia is moving toward an imminent invasion,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who leads the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, told reporters Thursday morning. “This is a crucial moment. This morning’s council meeting should not distract us from that fact — it should focus on what is happening right now in Ukraine.”
Thomas-Greenfield aired that warning after a night of shelling in eastern Ukraine, where Russian proxies and Ukrainian forces have been engaged in a low-profile war since 2014. The so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, one of the Russian proxy institutions established in the midst of the conflict, accused the Ukrainian military of “purposefully provoking the resumption of hostilities,” just days after a senior Russian official emphasized that such an incident would trigger a major Russian assault.
“We will not invade Ukraine unless we are provoked to do that,” Russian Ambassador Vladimir Chizhov, who is Putin’s envoy to the European Union, said Tuesday. “If the Ukrainians launch an attack against Russia, you shouldn’t be surprised if we counterattack — or if they start blatantly killing Russian citizens anywhere, Donbass or wherever.”
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Donbass is the name of the broader region in which the Russian proxies control territory. Russia scheduled the U.N. Security Council meeting with the stated goal of putting a spotlight on the status of the Minsk agreements, a pair of moribund peace deals that have not been implemented, in part because Ukraine maintains that the peace process cannot proceed unless Russian forces relinquish control of the territory they hold in Donbass. Russian officials, for their part, deny involvement in the conflict, which they portray as a civil war, and insist that the Minsk agreements require Ukraine to hold elections in the Donbass territories even without the central government controlling the border between those regions and Russia.
“Despite what Russia would have you believe — that it is the innocent victim — Russia is not only a party to this conflict, but the clear aggressor,” Ambassador Michael Carpenter, the U.S. envoy to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said earlier on Thursday. “It has forces in Russia-controlled areas. And yet it pretends to have no involvement in the conflict by insisting Ukraine negotiate with Russia’s own proxies in Donetsk and Luhansk.”
Russian officials have put a spotlight on the Minsk agreements throughout the recent military buildup, stating their intention to induce France and Germany to press Ukraine to take the steps that Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded. That controversy has been overshadowed by Russia’s publication, in December, of a so-called “draft treaty” that demanded a practical contraction of the NATO alliance. Blinken and NATO issued their response last month and received an answer in the hours before the Security Council meeting.
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“We can confirm that we have received a response from the Russian Federation,” a senior State Department official told reporters. “It was delivered to [U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan] in Moscow today.”
