The United States on Friday accused Russia of having “prepositioned” agents in Ukraine to carry out an operation that could serve as a “pretext for an invasion” by forces from Moscow. Statements that stoked tensions, as Kiev attributed to Moscow a cyberattack against its ministries.
“Russia is laying the groundwork to be able to create a pretext for an invasion from scratch, including through acts of sabotage and intelligence operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in the east. of Ukraine,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, detailing to the press the information available to Washington.
“The Russian army plans to start these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could start between mid-January and mid-February,” she warned, believing that such an attack could happen. accompanied by “widespread human rights violations and war crimes” if diplomacy fails.
The Kremlin called these claims “gratuitous,” saying they were “unsupported by any evidence.”
The United States has nevertheless decided to step up its accusations against the Kremlin after a series of high-level meetings between Westerners and Russians this week failed to ward off the risk of a new conflict. in Ukraine.
The Americans and Europeans have been saying for weeks that Moscow has deployed nearly 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border for a potential invasion and are threatening unprecedented sanctions if they go on the offensive. Russia denies such an intention and claims to want to defend itself against the posture deemed threatening by NATO at its gates.
His requests for guarantees as to the end of the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance in Eastern Europe, and in particular in Ukraine, have however been swept away by the West.
False flag operations
According to Jen Psaki, Washington “has information indicating that Russia has already prepositioned a group of agents to carry out false flag operations in eastern Ukraine”. “These agents are trained in urban guerrilla warfare and the use of explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russian-allied forces” by posing as Ukrainians, she added.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby explained that these agents could come from Russian “intelligence services, security services and even the army”. Their forces are often “hybrid”, to the point where “the boundaries are not necessarily very clear, or to whom they answer especially during these more clandestine operations”, he argued.
“Our information also indicates that Russian opinion leaders have already started to create provocations on Ukraine in public media and social networks to justify Russian intervention and sow division in the country”, continued for his part. Jen Psaki. For example, she spoke of an increase in talk about an alleged “worsening of the human rights situation in Ukraine.”
According to US intelligence, posts in Russian with such comments on social media increased to about 3,500 per day in December, “a 200% increase from the daily average in November”.
Cyberattack doomed
While diplomacy seems to be at an impasse, pending a formal response from the two rival camps on the follow-up to their dialogue, Kiev said on Friday that a “massive” cyberattack had targeted several of its ministries.
A threatening message – in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish – had been posted on the homepage of Ukrainian diplomacy by the perpetrators of the attack. “Ukrainians, be afraid and prepare for the worst. All your personal data has been uploaded to the web,” it read.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs quickly reported “preliminary clues” implicating “groups of hackers associated with the Russian secret services”.
Europeans and Americans condemned the sabotage.