IRIA News

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba downplayed a possible Russian invasion on February 6, urged people not to believe “apocalyptic predictions” after American officials warned that Russia plans to launch an operation to capture Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv.

Foreign Minister Kuleba posted on his Twitter that “Do not believe the apocalyptic predictions. Different capitals have different scenarios, but Ukraine is ready for any development.”

“Today, Ukraine has a strong army, unprecedented international support, and Ukrainians’ faith in their country. The enemy should be afraid of us, not us of them,” Kuleba added.

Ukraine’s presidency adviser Mykhailo Podolyak also stated that the chances of finding a diplomatic solution to the crisis remained “substantially higher than the threat of further escalation”.

On February 5, two U.S. administration senior officials warned that Russia may launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by mid-February in an attempt to capture the capital Kyiv, and topple the democratically elected President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The unnamed U.S. officials also claimed that Russia had reached about 70 percent of the military capability it requires to invade Ukraine and plans to send additional battalion tactical groups to the border areas. The U.S. officials stated that they did not believe that Russian President Putin had made the final decision to invade Ukraine, but if Russia goes ahead with its invasion plan there would be about 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers casualties and up to 50,000 civilian deaths.

According to U.S. sources, Russia is planning an operation by using fake drone strikes on the Donbas region or on Russian territory, while Russian state TV would broadcast the “false flags operations” and blame Ukraine for genocide against Russian-speaking people. Russia would then use the fake videos to justify an attack on Ukraine or have separatist forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine to invite a Russian intervention.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price highlighted that the United States publicized information about Moscow’s plan to expose “Russia’s destabilizing actions towards Ukraine and dissuade Russia from continuing this dangerous campaign and ultimately launching a military attack.”

However, Russian diplomat Dmitry Polyanskiy refuted such claims and termed it as “another masterpiece of U.S. propaganda war.” 

Polyanskiy said in a message on Twitter: “Unnamed officials, undisclosed sources, no evidence. And as we all saw, if you openly question such fakes you won’t get answers and will be labeled Russian apologist.”

Moscow repeatedly claims that it has no plans to attack Kyiv and instead put forward proposals to defuse tensions.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “The well-known psychedelic phobias by Western media about the ‘Russian aggression against Ukraine’ are under development in the forthcoming composition. However, time marches on and Russia is not attacking Ukraine. The calculation by the US who ordered this ‘tune’ and the British who joined the bandwagon is clear; they cooked up ‘the Russian threat’ themselves, they braced themselves for a ‘heroic fight’ against it, in order to commit a provocation and loudly declare their ‘victory’,” the spokeswoman noted.

“Here you’ve got both an opportunity to divert attention away from their own political crises and a chance to pour billions into arming ‘immature democracies,’ and a way of reviving the image of the ‘invincible’ after the Afghan fiasco,” she added.