US charges Russia sent saboteurs into Ukraine to create pretext for invasion

(Representative mage: Reuters)

The White House accused Moscow on Friday of sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage an incident that could provide President Vladimir Putin of Russia with a pretext for ordering an invasion of the country.

The administration did not release details of the evidence it had collected, but Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the operatives were trained in urban warfare and explosives.

“Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” Psaki said, “including through sabotage activities and information operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.”

She said the Russian military planned to begin these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could begin between mid-January and mid-February. She said Moscow was using the same playbook as it did in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, a part of Ukraine.

The U.S. allegations were clearly part of a strategy to try to prevent an attack by exposing it in advance. But without releasing the underlying intelligence — some of which has been provided to allies and shown to key members of Congress — the United States opened itself up to Russian charges that it was fabricating evidence.

The accusation by the United States came a day after the conclusion of a week of diplomatic encounters with Russia, moving from Geneva to Brussels to Vienna, in an effort to de-escalate the confrontation. But those talks ended without any agreement to pull back the approximately 100,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border.

The United States has vowed both severe financial and technological sanctions if Russia invades, and it has said it would consider arming a Ukrainian insurgency to make any Russian occupation expensive and bloody. Both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have warned their Russian counterparts in recent telephone calls that any swift Russian victory in Ukraine would probably be followed by a bloody insurgency similar to the one that drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

The Kremlin pushed back against the intelligence assessment. “So far, all these statements have been unfounded and have not been confirmed by anything,” Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told TASS, a state-run news agency.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By David E. Sanger

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