State Department officials working in Ukraine will withdraw across the border into Poland each night, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team announced hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to move openly into eastern Ukraine.
“For security reasons, Department of State personnel currently in Lviv will spend the night in Poland,” Blinken said in a Monday evening announcement. “Our personnel will regularly return to continue their diplomatic work in Ukraine and provide emergency consular services.”
That decision reflects the heightened risk of violence in light of Putin’s decision that his proxies in the war-torn Donbas region of eastern Ukraine have the right to declare themselves independent and invite in Russian troops. Lviv is on Ukraine’s western border, far removed from the theater where conflict has festered over the last eight years, but Putin signaled his willingness to widen the war if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy resists the Kremlin’s move to partition Ukraine.
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“The United States’s commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s aggression is unwavering,” Blinken said. “The fact that we are taking prudent precautions for the sake of the safety of U.S. government personnel and U.S. citizens, as we do regularly worldwide, in no way undermines our support for, or our commitment to, Ukraine. Our commitment to Ukraine transcends any one location.”
Blinken ordered the U.S. Embassy team in Kyiv to decamp for Lviv on Feb. 15, as the Russian military buildup in Belarus, ostensibly for defensive military exercises, brought Russian forces within easy striking distance of the Ukrainian capital. President Joe Biden’s team emphasized Monday that “the Russian troops moving into Donbas would not itself be a new step,” given Russia has controlled that territory for years, despite the Kremlin’s insistence that Russia has not been party to the conflict.
“But I also want to address the speech President Putin made today because we believe it made clear his true designs,” a senior administration official said. “This wasn’t a speech just about Russia’s security. It was an attack on the very idea of a sovereign and independent Ukraine. … This was a speech to the Russian people to justify a war. In fact, he once again explicitly threatened one.”
Biden is coming under bipartisan pressure to impose the “severe” economic sanctions that he pledged would follow any Russian incursion into Ukraine.
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“The time for taking action to impose significant costs on President Putin and the Kremlin starts now,” Sen. Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat who succeeded Biden in that seat after Biden became vice president under President Barack Obama, said Monday. “Instead of choosing the path of diplomatic engagement offered by the United States and Europe, President Putin, in a rambling, grievance-fueled speech today, has made clear he intends to further invade Ukraine in a blatant effort to redraw the borders of Eastern Europe according to the whims of Moscow.”
