President Joe Biden is ordering 2,000 U.S. troops to Poland and Germany amid the stalled talks with Russia over the Kremlin’s military buildup on Ukraine’s borders.
The United States has information indicating that Russia has developed a plan to stage a false Ukrainian military attack on Russian territory and leverage it as a pretext for an attack against Ukraine, according to a senior Biden administration official.
U.S. intelligence officials say fabricating a video of such an attack is one of several options the Kremlin is formulating to give it an excuse to invade Ukraine, the official said.
In an interview Thursday with MSNBC, U.S. deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer said, “We don’t know definitively that this is the route they are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration.”
The Biden administration disclosed the intelligence after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday welcomed U.S. plans to deploy more troops to Europe and said NATO is considering sending additional battle groups to the southeastern part of its alliance amid tensions along the Russia-Ukraine border.
The additional U.S. troops, part of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, are “not going to fight in Ukraine” in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. Rather, he said, the temporary deployment, which is separate from the 8,500 U.S. troops placed on heightened alert last week for possible dispatch to Europe, is intended as an “unmistakable signal that we stand with NATO.”
The United States and other Western allies have been preparing economic sanctions to level against Russia in hopes of persuading Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull back the more than 100,000 troops Russia has near the border with Ukraine. Russia has denied it plans to invade.
Source: VOA