Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has begun, a top Republican senator said Wednesday evening.
Marco Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made the declaration around 9:06 p.m. EST (4:06 a.m. Kyiv time) on Twitter and described what he expects the attack will entail. Shortly after Rubio sent the message, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine aimed at demilitarizing the country but not occupying it.
“The #Russian invasion of #Ukraine is now underway,” Rubio said.
“In the hours to come,” the Florida Republican said, Russia will “conduct strikes on air defense systems, move to cut off #Kyiv from eastern #Ukraine,” and “move to cut off Ukraine’s military forces on the line of contact in the east to prevent them from falling back to defend Kyiv.”
In the hours to come #Russia will
-conduct strikes on air defense systems
-move to cut off #Kyiv from eastern #Ukraine
-move to cut off Ukraine’s military forces on the line of contact in the east to prevent them from falling back to defend Kyiv— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 24, 2022
Rubio updated Fox News’s Sean Hannity on the situation later in the evening, reiterating that it looks like “this is it” as well as praising the toughness of the Ukrainians.
“The Ukrainian people, I keep telling everybody, they’re not asking for American soldiers,” he said. “We’re not sending anybody, and they’re not asking for any. They’re going to fight. These guys are tough people. They will fight, and this is going to [be] like eating a porcupine. It’s not going to be fun for Putin.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an address earlier Wednesday, spoken mostly in Russian, in which he warned that the Kremlin had nearly 200,000 soldiers and thousands of armored vehicles on the border ready to attack his country after Putin had already recognized two occupied regions, the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, as independent and tasked troops to go into those areas as so-called peacekeepers.
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Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that Russia is “ready to go” and that its forces could “attack at any time.”
