Ukraine

Maybe American presidents should avoid phone calls with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky because it seems nothing good ever comes from them.

Nothing about the accounts of the Thursday call between President Biden and Zelensky is reassuring, considering the brewing crisis of a potential Russian invasion.

If the leaks from unnamed sources are true — and who knows how accurate those characterizations are — the Russian military buildup is about to face a Ukrainian president who is in denial about the risk and an American president who doesn’t want to send more weapons to Ukraine, after equipping the Ukrainians to fight a ground war without any air cover.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed concerns of the US and its NATO allies about a Russian invasion Friday, accusing them of creating a “panic” and insisting that he knows the situation in his own country.

“Do we have tanks on the streets?” Zelensky asked reporters during a news conference. “No. When you read media, you get the image that we have troops in the city, people fleeing … That’s not the case.”

Joe ain’t in charge.

CNN Tries to Memory-Hole Ukraine President Telling Biden to ‘Calm Down’

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly told President Joe Biden to “calm down” and corrected him about Russian forces Biden believed were ready to “sack” Kyiv, according to a report CNN apparently tried to hide.

German intelligence chief: Russia has not decided whether to attack Ukraine

Russia has not yet decided whether to attack Ukraine but is prepared to do so, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has said, amid soaring tensions about the Kremlin-ordered military buildup.

“I believe that the decision to attack has not yet been made,” Bruno Kahl told Reuters.

The German assessment comes after the US president, Joe Biden, told his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Thursday there was “a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February”, according to a national security council spokesperson.

Germany and the US have warned they could target a key Russian gas pipeline if the country invades Ukraine.

A US state department spokesman said the Nord Stream 2 pipeline “will not move forward” if Russia were to attack.

The controversial energy project is designed to double gas flow and runs from Russia direct to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

It circumvents Ukraine, which relies on existing pipelines for income and is under threat from Russian forces.

Quiet capitulation is its greatest failure

Cast your mind back to February 2014 — and the dramatic conclusion to the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. Given the choice between alignment with Brussels or Moscow, there was no doubt as to where the crowd’s sympathies lay. 

On the night of the 20th, a special guest from the European Parliament got up on stage: Guy Verhofstadt, the arch-federalist and former Prime Minister of Belgium. Addressing the cheering throng he was full of praise: “you are defending European values and European principles.” 

Russia does not currently have enough troops on the border with Ukraine to carry out a full-scale military invasion and occupation of the country, according to western experts and senior officials in Kyiv.

They believe a Russian attack to capture most or all of Ukraine in the near future is unlikely, despite an unprecedented buildup of about 125,000 Russian soldiers, and military exercises due to take place next month in Belarus, within striking distance of the capital.

In an article published on Monday, Ukraine’s former defence minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said the Kremlin has not yet amassed the several hundred thousand troops necessary for a large-scale operation, on the border and in Russian territory behind the frontline.