U.S. puts 8,500 soldiers on alert
Troops ready for possible deployment to Eastern Europe as part of NATO effort against Russia
The Ukrainian soldiers watch and wait, nervously peering through a periscope from an icy trench at a forward observation post in eastern Ukraine.
Western governments have sounded alarms that Russia is prepared to attack Ukraine at any time. The Biden administration is considering moving troops, warships and artillery into Eastern Europe, and NATO announced Monday that member countries are sending ships and jets to the region.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has put 8,500 U.S. troops on “high alert” for possible deployment to Eastern Europe.
Most of the 8,500 troops would take part in a NATO response force that might soon be activated, said Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby. The remaining personnel would be part of a specific U.S. response to the deepening crisis, Defense Department officials said, most likely to provide assurance to U.S. allies in Eastern Europe that are fearful that Russia’s plans for Ukraine could extend to the Baltics and other countries in NATO’s so-called eastern flank.
“It’s very clear the Russians have no intention right now of de-escalating,” Kirby said at a news conference Monday. “What this is about, though, is reassurance to our NATO allies.”
But how, exactly, military action might start has become an anxious guessing game for military analysts, for Western and Ukrainian officials — and not least for Ukrainian soldiers, who are likely to be the first to find out.
“I would rather have peace,” said Ihor, a sergeant who is the Ukrainian unit’s cook and offered only his first name and rank, in keeping with military rules. “I have two kids at home.”
If an incursion does come, most military analysts agree it won’t begin with a massive show of force — tanks rolling over the border or a sudden and devastating strike from the air. Rather, it would start with a more ambiguous, limited action that Moscow would use as justification for a wider intervention.
Such an action, U.S. and Ukrainian officials say, could come in many different forms — the seizure by Russian-backed separatists of a disputed piece of infrastructure, like an electrical plant, for instance.
It could even start invisibly, with gas wafting through the air, if Russia decided to stage an accident at an ammonia plant in this area and then send in troops under the guise of bringing it under control. That possibility was raised this month by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.
Ukraine estimates that Russia has about 127,000 troops near its borders. The buildup, said Dmitry Adamsky, an expert on Russian security policy at Reichman University in Israel, “is visible enough to let people imagine a range of scenarios that might happen. At the same time, it’s uncertain enough to conceal the strategic intention.”
Russia has repeatedly denied that it has plans to invade Ukraine and said it is Russia whose security is threatened — by NATO exercises near its borders and weapons shipments to Ukraine.
Analysts say Russia has a rich repertoire of tricks that make it all but impossible to guess a first move. It demonstrated that with its first incursion into Ukraine in 2014. At the time, masked, mysterious soldiers appeared in Crimea in a military intervention that Russia initially denied but later acknowledged. Russian soldiers said to be “vacationing” or “volunteering” turned up in eastern Ukraine later that year.
A limited incursion might also serve Moscow’s goal of dividing NATO allies, with some countries seeing the action as insufficient cause to sanction Russia and others disagreeing. U.S. President Joe Biden last week hinted at potential divisions within the Western alliance over how to react to a provocation that falls short of an invasion — comments that the U.S. then tried to walk back after a backlash from Europe.
For soldiers in the East, where Ukraine has been fighting Russianbacked separatists for nearly eight years, the lack of clarity has made for a nerve-racking time.
“Maybe it will happen here,” said Lt. Sergei Goshko, who is responsible for civilian affairs on this part of the front line and was thus authorized to provide his full name. “Maybe it will happen south of here.”
“But we cannot know everything,” he added. “It’s a game of chess where you cannot see the moves in advance. Who will do what to whom? We don’t know.”