Antony Blinken is to meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, next week, as the US secretary of state warned the crisis in Ukraine was a “moment of peril for the lives and safety of millions of people”.
The US state department said on Thursday night that Blinken had accepted an invitation to meet Lavrov provided there was no invasion of Ukraine. The move provides hope that diplomatic channels remained open even as US warnings of an imminent invasion grow louder.
“If they do invade in the coming days, it will make clear they were never serious about diplomacy,” said state department spokesperson Ned Price. Blinken said earlier on Thursday he had sent a letter to Lavrov proposing a meeting in Europe.
A fresh flurry of meetings between western leaders begins on Friday, with the US president, Joe Biden, hosting a call with the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Britain, the European Union and Nato.
The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, is also due to arrive in Munich for several days of talks with global leaders including the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
On Friday, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, criticised Russia for its “cold war demands” and for declining to attend the meeting.
Earlier, the Ukrainian military said it had recorded 60 ceasefire violations by pro-Russian separatists over the past 24 hours, with one soldier injured. Separatists had opened fire on more than 10 settlements, using heavy artillery, mortars and a tank, it said.
Russian separatists made competing claims, accusing Kyiv government forces of firing artillery and mortars in three incidents on Friday, Interfax news agency reported.
Kyiv and the pro-Russian separatists have been at war for eight years and the ceasefire between the sides is routinely violated, but the intensity of fighting increased notably this week.
Echoing comments from Biden, Blinken told a UN security council meeting on Thursday night of the urgency of the situation: “Our information indicates clearly that [Russian] forces, including ground troops, aircraft, ships, are preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days.
“We don’t know precisely how things will play out, but here’s what the world can expect to see unfold. In fact, it’s unfolding right now,” he said.
“First, Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack. This could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine, or an outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian government. We don’t know exactly the form it will take. It could be a fabricated so-called terrorist bombing inside Russia. The invented discovery of the mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake – even a real – attack using chemical weapons.
“Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing, or a genocide, making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber do not take lightly.”
Before the UN meeting, the Russian mission circulated allegations of war crimes and “genocide” against the people of the Moscow-backed Luhansk and Donetsk separatist republics. Most of the allegations concerned accounts of civilian casualties from Ukrainian shelling, largely in 2014, when the conflict was most intense.
The Russian documents referred to “mass graves”, but it was unclear whether they were alleging the burial sites were dug by Ukrainian forces or by the families and communities of the dead during the fighting.
On Thursday night, the US Senate voted overwhelmingly to show unwavering support for an independent Ukraine and “condemn” Russian military aggression. The vote was unanimous, without objection or the formal roll call.
Senators have been racing all week to mount a response to rising tensions in the region, many eager to go even further by imposing sanctions on Vladimir Putin that would send shock waves through the Russian economy.
Ukraine has strong allies in the Senate, where there is broad support for sanctions on Russia as a powerful foreign policy tool to be used if Putin furthers his aggression toward Ukraine.
Tensions in the east of Ukraine have risen dramatically after Russian-backed separatists launched an intense artillery barrage on Thursday across the line of control with Ukrainian forces, shelling a nursery school and injuring three people.
Biden believes Russia is on the brink of invading Ukraine, and joined Nato allies in warning that the shelling may be an attempt to set up the pretext for an incursion.
The US president, speaking shortly after the expulsion of his country’s deputy ambassador to Moscow, said his administration had “reason to believe” that Russia was “engaged in a false-flag operation to have an excuse to go in”.
He told reporters: “Every indication we have is they’re prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine … My sense is it will happen in the next several days.”
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, called the attack on the nursery a “false-flag operation” aimed at discrediting the Ukrainian government.
Separatists in the Luhansk region claimed they had been forced to return fire in response to Ukrainian shelling, describing it as a “large-scale provocation”. Kyiv disputed the separatists’ claims, saying that Russian-backed groups had initiated the shelling and that its forces had not fired back.
Two civilians were wounded when the nursery building in Stanytsia Luhanska was hit, according to the Ukrainian military. More shelling of the town was reported on Thursday night, but with no immediate reports of casualties. Zelenskiy described the actions of the pro-Russian separatists as a “big provocation”.
Russia handed over its long-awaited response to American and Nato proposals about European security on Thursday. The Kremlin said in its 10-page letter that the US had not taken its concerns seriously about Ukraine’s potential to join Nato and that Russia would need to take unspecified “measures of a military-technical nature”.
