LAST UPDATE | 18 Feb 2022

US PRESIDENT JOE Biden has said that he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine, but added that there is still room for diplomacy to defuse the crisis.

“As of this moment I’m convinced he’s made the decision. We have reason to believe that,” said the president — saying an attack could come in the next “weeks” or “days.”

“Until he does, diplomacy is always a possibility,” Biden added.

“We believe they will target Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people,” he said of Russian forces.

But with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken scheduled to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday, Biden said there is still time for negotiations to defuse the crisis.

“Diplomacy is always a possibility,” he said.

Biden said Moscow is conducting a disinformation campaign, including accusing Kyiv of planning its own attack in order to create a pretext for a Russian invasion.

“There is simply no evidence to these assertions and it defies basic logic to believe the Ukrainians would choose this moment, with well over 150,000 (Russian) troops arrayed on its borders, to escalate a years-long conflict,” Biden said.

“All these are consistent with the playbook the Russians have used before to set up a false justification to act against Ukraine,” Biden said at the White House.

“The American people are united. Europe is united. The Transatlantic community is united. The entire free world is united. Russia has a choice — between war and all the suffering that it will bring — or diplomacy that will make the future safer for everyone,” he said.

The US has already said it is “ready” for fallout if Russia decides to “weaponise” its massive energy reserves in response to Western sanctions, a senior US official said this evening.

“If Russia decides to weaponise its energy supply, we’re ready,” White House deputy national security advisor for international economics Daleep Singh told reporters.

“We’ve been taking steps… to coordinate with major energy consumers, major energy producers to ensure that we have steady energy supplies and… stable energy markets,” he said.

Earlier, eastern Ukraine’s separatist pro-Moscow republics said they will begin evacuating civilians to Russia as fears of a large-scale conflict grow.

“From today, a mass centralised departure of the population to the Russian Federation has been organised. Women, children and the elderly are subject to be evacuated first,” said Denis Pushilin, head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR)

An AFP reporter near the front between government forces and rebel-held territory in the Lugansk region heard the thud of explosions and saw damaged civilian buildings on Kyiv’s side of the line.

But in the rebel-held areas of Donetsk and Lugansk, separatist leaders accused Kyiv of planning an offensive and government forces of carrying out sabotage, in what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken dubbed a strategy of “creating false provocations”.

Amid concern that Moscow would take the purported Ukrainian offensive as a pretext to launch its own intervention, Ukraine’s foreign minister furiously denied the allegations.

“We categorically refute Russian disinformation reports on Ukraine’s alleged offensive operations or acts of sabotage in chemical production facilities,” Dmytro Kuleba declared on Twitter.

“Ukraine does not conduct or plan any such actions in the Donbas. We are fully committed to diplomatic conflict resolution only.”

The leader of the Lugansk separatist region in eastern Ukraine Leonid Pasechnik also urged residents to evacuate “to prevent civilian casualties”.

Rebel leader Pushilin called on people to listen to the authorities and cooperate with the evacuation plan.

“Temporary escape will protect your life and health, and that of your relatives,” Pushilin said.

He announced the evacuation as fears of a large-scale conflict in eastern Ukraine grow.

The West says Russia could attack Ukraine at any moment, despite Moscow saying it has pulled back some of its forces from Ukraine’s borders.

It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin says that he plans on personally overseeing massive drills of the Russian military’s strategic forces, including the launch of cruise and ballistic missiles. 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin would observe the drills from the Defence Ministry’s situation room and supervise the practice missile launches himself.

The ministry said it planned the manoeuvres some time ago to check the readiness of Russia’s military command and personnel, as well as the reliability of its nuclear and conventional weapons.

The war games follow US president Joe Biden’s warning on Thursday that Russia could invade Ukraine within days.

Biden is to hold video talks with Western allies, including the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany and NATO, later today to discuss the crisis.

Western fears focus on an estimated 150,000 Russian troops – including about 60% of Russia’s overall ground forces – concentrated near Ukraine’s borders. The Kremlin insists it has no plans to invade.

But Moscow has demanded that the US and its allies keep Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations out of Nato, not deploy weapons in Ukraine and pull back Nato forces from Eastern Europe.

Washington and its allies bluntly rejected the Russian demands, and Moscow threatened to take unspecified “military-technical measures” if the West continues to stonewall.

Russia holds massive drills of its strategic nuclear forces on an annual basis, but the manoeuvres planned for Saturday pointedly involve the Black Sea Fleet.

The fleet is based on the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The Black Sea Fleet has surface warships and submarines equipped with Kalibr cruise missiles, but it does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles and did not take part in similar previous drills of the country’s strategic forces.

Peskov said Russia notified foreign partners in advance and the exercise should not cause worries in the West.

“Practice launches of ballistic missiles are part of regular training,” he said. “They are preceded by a series of notices to other nations via different channels.”

The strategic forces of both Russia and the United States include a nuclear triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based ICBMs and nuclear-capable bombers.

The exercise of Russia’s nuclear forces follows a series of sweeping drills that the Russian military held near Ukraine and in Belarus, an ally of Moscow that neighbours Ukraine to the north.

The Russian military said it started pulling troops back to their permanent bases after the drill. The US and its allies questioned the claim and said that Moscow has actually moved thousands of new troops closer to Ukraine.

Moscow argued that the pullback takes time and rejected Western criticism, saying that it would deploy troops wherever it is necessary to ensure national security.

UN chief Antonio Guterres said it would be “catastrophic” if the Russia-Ukraine crisis escalated into a war.

“With a concentration of Russian troops around Ukraine, I am deeply concerned about heightened tensions and increased speculation about a military conflict in Europe,” Guterres said.

If that happened, “it would be catastrophic. There is no alternative to diplomacy.”

- Contains reporting from © AFP 2022