President Joe Biden convened a rare Sunday meeting of the National Security Council on the escalating crisis in Ukraine, the White House said, amid a spike in violence that has heightened fears that Russia is planning to invade.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, both newly back from Europe, were spotted entering the West Wing shortly before noon.
A White House official said Vice President Kamala Harris would participate in the meeting remotely from Air Force Two as she flies back from Germany, where she met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the weekend at the annual Munich Security Conference.
Biden’s national security team has “reaffirmed that Russia could launch an attack against Ukraine at any time,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement announcing the meeting Saturday.
Blinken said earlier Sunday that Russia’s recent decision to extend military drills in Belarus “suggest that this is dead serious, that we are on the brink of an invasion.”
“We will do everything we can to try to prevent it before it happens, but equally we’re prepared, if he does follow through, to impose massive consequences, to provide for Ukraine’s ongoing defense and to bolster NATO,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Blinken indicated on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his scheduled meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week would be canceled if Moscow invades Ukraine. Asked if the meeting is canceled it would mean a “war has begun,” Blinken told host Chuck Todd, “That’s a pretty good summary.”
“Yes, look, we’re doing everything we can,” he said. “And it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to try diplomatically to prevent a war.”
Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recorded a significant rise in cease-fire violations in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, where the Moscow-supported separatists have been fighting government forces since 2014 despite a series of shaky cease-fires.
It said late Saturday that 975 cease-fire violations were recorded in the Luhansk region Friday and 591 in the Donetsk region. As a policy the OSCE does not tend to attribute blame, but those numbers are significantly higher than the ones it reported earlier this week.
Officials in the separatist territories claimed Ukrainian forces launched several artillery attacks over the past days, and that two civilians were killed in an unsuccessful assault on a village under their control early Sunday.
A Ukrainian official insisted the country’s forces were not responsible as his country’s troops had been “instructed to refrain from any active action, realizing that the Russians are now looking for any excuse to invade.”
The Ukrainian army also said a soldier was injured as the result of further cease-fire violations by the separatists.
The Ukrainian military on Sunday also closed a key checkpoint leading to the separatist region after it came under repeated shelling.
Ukraine has repeatedly denied it would launch an offensive on the separatist-held region and has said it wants a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.
The U.S. and Western officials have also warned the area could be used by the Kremlin to stage a “false flag” operation to create an excuse for a wider invasion, and Zelenskyy said Saturday that accusations about his forces shelling in the region were “pure lies.”
After separatists leaders called for citizens to evacuate Friday, warning of a possible attack by Kyiv, more than 40,000 people crossed the border into Russia, the country’s state-run Tass news agency reported Sunday.
With tensions rising in eastern Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that “any spark, any unplanned incident or any minor planned provocation can lead to irreparable consequences” in an interview with the country’s state-run “Russia 1” TV Channel Sunday.
To Ukraine’s north in Belarus, where its forces have been conducting massive military drills with the Russian military, the country’s defense ministry said in a statement that the maneuvers had finished, but “readiness checks” would continue because of the rising tensions.
The U.S. and its allies had previously raised concerns that the drills could provide cover for an invasion by Moscow in what’s quickly becoming Europe’s gravest security crisis since the Cold War.
Russia has insisted that the drills are purely defensive in nature and its troops, which NATO estimates number at around 30,000, will return to their stations once the exercises are finished.
Michael Carpenter, U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE, tweeted Sunday that none of Belarus’ claims regarding the “unprecedented Russian military maneuvers on its territory” had been “credible,” and called the justification for continuing them “flimsy.”
Moscow, despite amassing tens of thousands of troops around Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders, has repeatedly denied that it plans to invade Ukraine.
Austin said Sunday that Russia’s military build up near the border has heightened fears of an invasion.
“If he employs that kind of combat power, it will certainly create enormous casualties within the civilian population and so this could create a tragedy, quite frankly, in terms of refugee flow and displaced people,” Austin said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Sunday that ongoing diplomatic efforts by the U.S., NATO and its allies to curb an invasion means that Putin “will be responsible for casualties” if he moves on Ukraine. “They won’t have an excuse that merits any sort of credibility,” Kirby said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding that Russia still has “diplomatic options left on the table.”
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, asked his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to meet him on Saturday in a speech at a security conference in the German city of Munich.
“I don’t know what the president of the Russian Federation wants, so I am proposing a meeting,” Zelenskyy told delegates at the event which was attended Vice President Kamala Harris and other Western leaders.
The Kremlin has not responded.
In a speech at the conference on Saturday, Zelenskyy called for immediate sanctions against Moscow. Blinken on Sunday defended the administration’s decision not to issue sanctions ahead of a possible invasion.
“We’re going to try everything we possibly can to get President Putin to reverse the decision we believe he’s made and to dissuade him,” he said on “Meet the Press,” adding that “part of that is the prospect of massive sanctions.”
Harris wrapped up a weekend of outreach to European allies with a push to bolster the West’s resolve in confronting Moscow with severe sanctions.
“We’re talking about the potential for war in Europe. I mean, let’s really take a moment to understand the significance of what we’re talking about,” Harris told reporters before her return to Washington.