😓 Ominous Russian troops movements in Black Sea raise alarm Ukraine crisis NATO Moscow invasion news

The Ukraine crisis entered a new state of intensity over the weekend, as the U.S. warned that movement by Russian troops — now numbering well over 100,000 along the Ukrainian border — and unspecified intelligence has led Washington to believe Moscow is on the brink of an invasion.

“We are in the window. And an invasion could begin — a major military action could begin — by Russia, in Ukraine, any day now,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday on CNN.

But it’s not just Russian troop movements that are setting off alarm bells. A large naval buildup in the Black and Mediterranean seas has created another threat to Ukraine near Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014.

“This is an unprecedented Russian naval presence,” Andrii Klymenko of Ukraine’s Institute of Black Sea Strategic Studies told Yahoo News via a translator, adding that 12 landing ships had appeared in the Black Sea on Friday. Such a concentration, he said, hasn’t been seen since the Cold War ended three decades ago.

“We haven’t seen a movement like this in recent history,” retired U.S. Adm. James Foggo, who commanded European NATO naval forces until last year, similarly told Politico.

According to Black Sea News, “On Saturday, Black Sea exercises started with more than 30 Russian military ships,” including submarines and cruisers. The drills are also using aviation and land troops in maneuvers, according to the website. The maneuvers, which officially began Feb. 13 and are scheduled to continue through Feb. 22, “will launch missile and bomb strikes” against sea, air and coastal targets, according to the TVzvezda.ru site.

In its notification last week of the upcoming exercises in the Black Sea, a body of water that is about the size of the Northeastern U.S., the Russian government sent out a map showing “no-go zones,” shocking Mykhailo Samus, director of New Geopolitics Research Network, a think tank based in Kyiv.

“On the map, they’re closing down nearly half of the Black Sea,” he told Yahoo News. “It's crazy.” While countries normally close off certain zones during military exercises, he said, “normally it’s not half the sea.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said the Russian naval operation amounted to a blockade of the country, which relies on commercial sea vessels for over half of its exports. “The maneuvers make navigation” in both the Black and Azov seas “virtually impossible,” the Ukrainian government said.

Previous thinking held that Russia was unlikely to strike before the Feb. 20 end of the Beijing Olympics to avoid antagonizing the Chinese government. But the U.S. announced at the end of last week that its view of the crisis had shifted and it is now bracing for an attack to come any day.

The U.S. evacuated its embassy in Kyiv this weekend and told American citizens that it was “past time to leave” Ukraine. Other countries, including Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia and even Russia, have similarly evacuated embassy personnel. “Things could go crazy quickly,” President Biden warned in an NBC interview.

Biden has vowed that the U.S. would not send troops to Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO, saying such an effort would risk “world war.” But the U.S. has promised a punishing round of sanctions and a unified Western response to a Russian invasion.

The Kremlin has rejected and downplayed reports that it plans to attack Ukraine, but it has not stopped encircling its ex-Soviet bloc neighbor. In addition to naval movements in the south, tens of thousands of Russians are engaged in military exercises with Belarusian forces to Ukraine’s north; pro-Russian separatists are also conducting drills in the Donbass region in Ukraine’s east, where Russia has armed and financed a proxy war for nearly eight years.

Washington has also been rapidly declassifying its intelligence on Russian movements, hoping that such transparency will frustrate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s operations. In particular, the U.S. has warned that the Kremlin is looking to stage a “false flag” attack to fabricate Ukrainian aggression and justify their supposed response.

“The world should be prepared for Russia staging a pretext and then launching a potential military action,” Sullivan said Sunday.

Inform Napalm, a respected volunteer Ukrainian intelligence group, spotted peculiar activity last week by Russian military near the Crimea Bridge, the almost 12-mile bridge constructed by Russia across the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, which is uneasily shared by Russia and Ukraine. Inform Napalm’s spokesman Mykhailo Makaruk noted that the group had received reports “about Russian military engineers” on boats “working near the bridge.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-ukr...