US says Russia may create pretext to attack Ukraine

Russia could invade Ukraine at any time and might create a surprise pretext for an attack, the United States said yesterday, as it reaffirmed a pledge to defend “every inch” of Nato territory.Moscow denies any such plans and has accused the West of “hysteria”.German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on the eve of a trip that takes him to Kyiv today and Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin tomorrow, called for Russia to de-escalate and warned of sanctions if Moscow did invade.A German official said Berlin did not expect “concrete results” but diplomacy was important.In Washington, President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said an invasion could begin “any day now”.“We cannot perfectly predict the day, but we have now been saying for some time that we are in the window,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN.US officials said they could not confirm reports that US intelligence indicated Russia planned to invade on Wednesday.Sullivan said Washington would continue sharing what it learned with the world in order to deny Moscow the chance to stage a surprise “false flag” operation that could be a pretext for an attack.It would also “defend every inch of Nato territory ... and Russia we think fully understands that message,” Sullivan added in a separate CBS interview.Biden spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy yesterday and they agreed on the importance of continuing to pursue diplomacy and deterrence in response to Russia’s military build-up, the White House said after the call.Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said on Twitter that Kyiv had so far received almost 1,500 tonnes of ammunition from allies delivered on 17 flights, including about 180 tonnes from the United States.Sullivan repeated a warning for Americans to leave Ukraine, after the State Department said the US embassy’s remaining diplomatic staff would work from the western city of Lviv.“The diplomatic path remains open. The way for Moscow to show that it wants to pursue that path is simple,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said after he held talks on Saturday with Asian allies.Washington and its European allies and others have been scaling back or evacuating embassy staff and urging citizens to depart immediately or avoid travel to Ukraine.US staff at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) began leaving by car from the rebel-held city of Donetsk in east Ukraine yesterday, a Reuters witness said.The OSCE conducts operations in Ukraine including a civilian monitoring mission in Russian-backed, self-proclaimed separatist republics in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where a war that began in 2014 has killed more than 14,000 people.Dutch carrier KLM said it would stop flying to Ukraine and Germany’s Lufthansa said it was considering suspending flights.An adviser to Zelenskiy, Mykhailo Podolyak, said that regardless of what airlines chose to do Kyiv would not close its airspace as that would resemble “a kind of partial blockade”.British defence minister Ben Wallace cautioned against putting too much hope in talks, telling The Sunday Times of London that there was “a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West”, referring to a 1938 pact that failed to halt German expansionism under Adolf Hitler.