The United States has alleged that current and former Ukrainian government officials are being recruited by Russian intelligence to take over the government in Kiev and cooperate with a Russian occupation force.
The US Treasury on Thursday issued sanctions on two Ukrainian members of parliament and two former officials it said were involved in the alleged conspiracy, which involved discrediting the current government of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“Russia has directed its intelligence services to recruit current and former Ukrainian government officials to prepare to take over Ukraine’s government and control Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with a Russian occupation force.” said the Treasury statement accompanying the sanctions.
The claims suggest that US intelligence fears Russia is preparing for a full-scale invasion and not the “minor incursion” that Joe Biden referred to as a possibility in Wednesday’s comments that set off alarm bells in Kiev.
In those comments, Biden seemed to be saying that if Russia invaded just a small part of Ukraine, the NATO alliance would be divided on how to respond. Speaking Thursday, the US president sought to clarify those comments.
“If any assembled Russian unit crosses the border into Ukraine, that is an invasion,” he said. “Let there be no doubt that if Putin makes this decision, Russia will pay a heavy price.”
Biden added that the United States and its allies would also need to be ready to respond if Russia employs “measures other than open military action to carry out aggression” against Ukraine.
The president spoke shortly after Zelenskiy complained in a tweet: “We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations. Just as there are no minor victims and little pain for the loss of loved ones.
The United States has threatened unprecedented sanctions against Russia if it goes ahead with an invasion, though there are disagreements with European allies, as Biden admitted on Wednesday, over how extensive the punitive measures should be. European capitals have resisted the suggestion that Russia should be cut off from the international electronic payment system, Swift.
The US, UK and other allies also continued to supply Ukraine with weapons, in a move intended to increase the costs of an invasion and potentially contribute to a Ukrainian insurgency in the wake of an invasion.
Despite the threats, Russian forces have continued to build up near the Ukrainian border. Tanks and short-range ballistic missiles have been photographed heading west on trains from positions in Russia’s far east. Satellite images show a growing number of camps of men and equipment in Ukraine’s border region, and Russian and Belarusian troops have been conducting military exercises, which the United States says are unusually large and take place without warning.
The two parliamentarians on whom the United States has imposed sanctions are Taras Kozak and Oleh Voloshyn, both members of a pro-Russian party led by Victor Medvedchuk, an oligarch who has been under house arrest in Ukraine since last May, accused of treason.
A former Ukrainian official, Volodymyr Oliynyk, who now lives in Russia, has a sanction against him for working “under the direction of the FSB [Russian intelligence] to collect information on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine.”
The fourth man named is Vladimir Sivkovich, a former deputy secretary of Ukraine’s defense and national security council.
“In 2021, Sivkovich worked with a network of Russian intelligence actors to carry out influence operations that attempted to build support for Ukraine to officially cede Crimea to Russia in exchange for a reduction in Russian-backed forces in Donbas,” the report alleged. US Treasury.
Voloshyn strongly denied being a Russian asset, saying he had never “knowingly” spoken with the FSB or any other Russian spy agency. He said he was an elected deputy from an explicitly pro-Russian political party and that his skeptical views of the United States mirrored those of some Ukrainian voters.
Voloshyn said he suspected he was being punished for unsuccessfully calling for a parliamentary investigation into Biden’s son Hunter and his work in Ukraine.
In an interview, Voloshyn described the US accusations against him as “strange.” He said he had been interviewed by the FBI last summer when he flew to Washington, adding that he had been in regular contact in the past with the US embassy in Kiev.
He said he last visited Moscow in November for a national prayer breakfast, his first trip to Russia in two years. “There were multiple Americans at the same breakfast,” he said. Voloshyn said he knew Kozak but had never met the other two Ukrainians who were sanctioned.
The other three men could not be immediately reached for comment. Russia has denied plans to invade Ukraine but has massed more than 100,000 troops along the country’s border.
“There has been a lot of speculation about President Putin’s true intentions, but we don’t really have to guess. He has told us repeatedly. He is laying the groundwork for an invasion because he doesn’t believe Ukraine is a sovereign nation,” US Secretary of State Tony Blinken said in a speech in Berlin.
Blinken will meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva on Friday.
Three sets of talks between Russia, the US, NATO and other European states last week failed to make any progress.
The United States and NATO have offered negotiations to limit missile deployments and military exercises, but Russian officials have demanded broad security guarantees, that Ukraine never join NATO and that the alliance will withdraw forces from member states from Eastern Europe that were once part of NATO. communist bloc.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism