U.S. charges Russia has saboteurs in Ukraine
WASHINGTON >> The Biden administration 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 parts or all of the country.
The White House did not release details of the evidence it had collected to back up its charge, though one official said it was a mix of intercepted communications and observations of the movements of people. In an email, a U.S. official wrote that “Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion, including through sabotage activities and information operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.”
John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, called the intelligence about the operation “very credible” when asked about it at a Pentagon briefing Friday.
The U.S. official who described the intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that the assessment found that “the Russian military plans to begin these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could begin between midJanuary and mid-February. We saw this playbook in 2014 with Crimea.”
Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, a part of Ukraine, that year. It also sent military forces, who operated without wearing uniforms, into the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, where the war has been grinding on.
The accusation came a day after the conclusion of a week of diplomatic encounters with Russia 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 release was clearly part of a strategy to try to prevent the attacks by exposing them in advance. But without releasing the underlying intelligence, the United States opens itself up to Russian charges that it is fabricating evidence.
The official said that the United
States had “information that indicates Russia has already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine.” The operatives “are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.”
The Kremlin pushed back against the intelligence assessment. “So far, all these statements have been unfounded and have not been confirmed by anything,” Dmitri S. Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told Tass, a state-run news agency.