The National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said Friday that a Russian invasion could intervene before the end of the Olympic Games. He even evoked the hypothesis of a Kiev taken, the Ukrainian capital.
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Preventive prescience or dramatization? It will be necessary to wait a few days, or even a few weeks, to definitely put the words on the outstanding appearance of Jake Sullivan in the newsroom at the White House, Friday, February 11th. The national security advisor came in person launching a new alert, more alarmist still than the previous ones, about the Russian military threat to Ukraine.
An operation “could start during the Olympic Games [from Beijing, which will end on February 20],” said Jake Sullivan, mentioning the arrival of “new forces” near the border. The adjective “imminent” is returning to the official vocabulary, after being abandoned a time. The American counselor recognizes, in the same movement, that the United States do not know if Vladimir Putin has made a final decision, and in what way.
“Things could become gamblers quickly,” said Joe Biden on the NBC chain on Thursday night. The US President and his Russian counterfeiture must once again talk by telephone on Saturday, after another conversation, between Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron. While contacts are multiplying at an unprecedented pace between allies, the diplomatic room for maneuver, to avoid a military climbing, seems reduced. Thursday in Berlin, the failure of the Normandy Discussions between the French, German, Ukrainian and Russian representatives, only consolidated the differences in approaches to the Donbass, region in the hands of the separatists controlled by Moscow.
The White House therefore takes an additional step in the denunciations of the Russian intentions, since the beginning of the massive military deployment at the border in November 2021. The National Security Advisor has renewed official warnings about “the Creation of a pretext “, by Russia – an incident attributed to the Ukrainians – to justify a military operation.
Usually, the operational assumptions are recorded in confidential notes. The Biden administration, in fact, public arguments, but without revealing the precise content, the supported origin. Mr Sullivan thus evoked the possible seizure of Ukrainian territory, big cities, and even “a quick assault on the city of Kiev”, the capital.
The spectrum of chaotic evacuation. Afghanistan
Such an enterprise would be disastrous in terms of civilian losses, economic and political replicas. It would probably be poorly perceived by the Russian public, on behalf of family and cultural ties between the two peoples.
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