U.S. warns of Russian ‘false-flag’ operation
Moscow prepping pretext for Ukraine invasion, official says
The Biden administration has determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to potentially further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct “a false-flag operation” in eastern Ukraine, a U.S. official said Friday.
The administration believes Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign by framing Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to discuss sensitive intelligence on the record,
U.S. intelligence officials have determined Russia has already dispatched operatives trained in urban warfare who could use explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces — blaming the acts on Ukraine — if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides he wants to move forward with an invasion, the official added.
The official did not provide details about how the intelligence community came to its determination or how much confidence they have in the assessment.
A second person familiar with the discussions between Washington and Kyiv about the crisis said the White House had not notified Ukraine before announcing Friday’s release.
Ukraine is also monitoring the alleged use of disinformation by Russia.
Separately, Ukrainian media on Friday reported that authorities believed Russian special services were planning a possible false-flag incident that could be seen as provoking additional conflict.
The new U.S. intelligence was unveiled after a series of talks between Russia and the U.S. and western allies this week in Europe aimed at heading off the escalating crisis made little progress.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday said that the U.S. intelligence community has not made an assessment that the Russians, who have massed some 100,000 troops on the Ukraine border, have definitively decided to take a military course of action in Ukraine.
But Sullivan said Russia is laying the groundwork to invade under false pretences should Putin decide to go that route. He said the Russians have been planning “sabotage activities and information operations” that accuse Ukraine of prepping for its own imminent attack against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine. He said that the move is similar to what the Kremlin did in the lead-up to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that had been under Ukraine’s jurisdiction since 1954.
The Russians, while maintaining they don’t plan to invade Ukraine, are demanding that the U.S. and NATO provide written guarantees that the alliance will not expand eastward. The U.S. has called such demands nonstarters, but said that it’s willing to negotiate with Moscow about possible future deployments of offensive missiles in Ukraine and putting limits on U.S. and NATO military exercises in Eastern Europe.
The Russians, while maintaining they don’t plan to invade Ukraine, are demanding that the U.S. and NATO provide written guarantees that the alliance will not expand eastward
Cyberattack in Ukraine
A cyberattack left a number of Ukrainian government websites temporarily unavailable on Friday, officials said.
While it wasn’t immediately clear who was behind the cyberattack, the disruption came amid heightened tensions with Russia and after talks between Moscow and the West failed to yield any significant progress this week.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko told The Associated Press it was too soon to tell who could have been behind the attack, “but there is a long record of Russian cyber assaults against Ukraine in the past.”
Moscow had previously denied involvement in cyberattacks against Ukraine.
About 70 websites of both national and regional government bodies have been targeted by the attack, according to Victor Zhora, deputy chair of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection.
Zhora stressed, however, that no critical infrastructure was affected and no personal data was leaked.