Separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine have ordered a full military mobilisation, further escalating tensions in the region after Washington said Moscow would invade within days, and Ukraine’s president headed to Europe to drum up support.
As the Kremlin said that Vladimir Putin will oversee major military drills along Ukraine’s borders on Saturday, the head of the pro-Russian separatist government in the Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, released a statement announcing a war footing and urging reservists to show up at military enlistment offices.
Shortly after the announcement on Saturday morning, a second separatist leader, Leonid Pasechnik of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), signed a decree calling for a full military mobilisation, according to Reuters.
The statements added to the febrile situation in eastern Ukraine, where the rebels have ordered mass evacuations in the face of alleged shelling and mortar attacks by the Ukrainian army.
The US president, Joe Biden, renewed his warnings on Friday night that a Russian invasion of its neighbour could happen at any time, and said that claims by pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine that they were under attack by Ukrainian government forces were “fabricated”.
Monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said on Saturday they had seen a significant rise in the number of attacks along the front line, particularly in the separatist areas of Donetsk and Lugansk, fuelling western fears that Moscow could use it as a pretext for an invasion.
The Pentagon also said that 40% of Russia’s estimated 150,000-strong forces on the border were in “attack position”. US officials think that the total number of troops is 190,000 when Ukrainian pro-Moscow rebels are included in the figure.
Compounding western concern about Russia’s military buildup, Russia’s defence ministry announced that Putin would personally oversee drills on Saturday that will involve multiple practice missile launches.
The Kremlin denies it has any plans to attack Ukraine and added to the war of words on Saturday morning by rejecting US allegations that it was responsible for cyber-attacks on Ukrainian banking and government websites earlier in the week.
“We categorically reject these baseless statements of the administration and note that Russia has nothing to do with the mentioned events and in principle has never conducted and does not conduct any ‘malicious’ operations in cyberspace,” the Russian embassy in the US said on Twitter.
The US deputy national security adviser, Anne Neuberger, said on Friday that Russian military intelligence was behind the recent spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that briefly knocked Ukrainian banking and government websites offline.
Speaking in Washington on Friday night, Biden said that the invasion would come in the next week or days and that his Russian counterpart Putin had “made the decision” to invade. But Biden left the door open for a diplomatic resolution.
“Russia has a choice between war and all the suffering it will bring or diplomacy that will make a future for everyone,” Biden said at the White House.
“[Putin’s] focused on trying to convince the world he has the ability to change the dynamics in Europe in a way that he cannot,” Bided added.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was due to travel to Germany on Saturday to meet western leaders at the Munich security conference, including the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss.
But Biden questioned whether it was a “wise choice” for Ukraine’s leader to leave his country as war fears reached a fever pitch.
There were growing fears that a spark, which Washington warns could be a deliberate “false flag” incident orchestrated by Moscow, could set off the largest military confrontation in Europe since the second world war.
The Nato chief, Jens Stoltenberg, who will also be at the Munich security conference, warned the size of the assembled Russian force far exceeded that needed for military drills, and that Russia had the capacity to invade without warning.
France and Germany have urged Russia to use its influence on rebels in Ukraine’s disputed east to “encourage restraint and contribute to de-escalation”.
An Agence France-Presse reporter near the front between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the Lugansk region heard explosions and saw damaged civilian buildings on Kyiv’s side of the line.
Officials told local media that 25,000 people had left Lugansk and more than 6,000 had left Donetsk for Russia. There were reports of long car queues at checkpoints in Donetsk.
Seeking to reverse the aggressor narrative, Moscow-backed leaders have accused Kyiv of planning an offensive to retake the eastern territories. The evacuations of civilians there were said to be in response to worries about a government attack.
Russian news agencies quoted officials in Lugansk saying there had been two explosions within an hour on a gas pipeline but the fires were under control.
But the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who will meet his Russian counterpart for talks on Thursday, according to Biden, accused the Kremlin of mounting a propaganda campaign to create an excuse for war.
Biden again ruled out sending US troops into Ukraine, but his administration reiterated that it would hit Moscow with costly sanctions that would transform Russia into “a pariah to the international community”.
