Ukrainian officials sharply criticised the Biden administration on Friday for its ominous warnings of an imminent Russian attack, saying they had needlessly spread alarm, even as a new Pentagon assessment said Russia was now positioned to go beyond a limited incursion and invade all of Ukraine.
The diverging viewpoints brought into the open the stark disagreement between Ukraine and its key partner over how to assess the threat posed by Russia, which has massed about 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s border in what American officials are calling a grave threat to global peace and stability.
The tensions, which have simmered in the background for weeks, have surfaced at a particularly delicate moment, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia reviews the American response to his demands for addressing Russian security concerns in eastern Europe.
“They keep supporting this theme, this topic,’’ President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said of the repeated warnings by American officials. “And they make it as acute and burning as possible. In my opinion, this is a mistake.”
Zelensky voiced his displeasure just hours before top US military officials issued another dire appraisal of Ukraine’s predicament, saying that Russia has deployed troops and military hardware to invade all of Ukraine, far beyond a limited incursion into only the border regions.
“I think you’d have to go back quite a while to the Cold War days to see something of this magnitude,” General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
told a news conference at the Pentagon. Moscow has threatened a “military-technical response” should its concerns not be met.
As the West awaited Putin’s next step, Ukrainian officials expressed increasing annoyance with the Biden administration as they stepped up their calls for calm.
Speaking just a day after a phone call with President Biden, Zelensky said that while he too saw grave risk in the Russian build-up, the American policy of publicising intelligence and risk assessments around the Russian threat was unnerving Ukrainians and harming the economy at a time when he said he would like to see “quiet military preparation and quiet diplomacy.”
“There is military support, financial support, we are grateful for the support,” Zelensky said at a news conference for foreign media, according to a Ukrainian government translation. “But I cannot be like other politicians who are grateful to the United States just for being the United States.”
His complaints were echoed by his top security official, Oleksii Danilov, who said in an interview that “panic is the sister of failure”.
New York Times News Service
