(John Ransom, Headline USA) Warning of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, State Department officials admitted in a call with reporters that the US would not be in a position to evacuate US citizens in the event of a Russian invasion and citizens should plan on evacuating by commercial flight, according to a transcript of the call.
Ukraine just slammed US for pulling diplomatic families from Kiev
EU announced they aren’t pulling diplomats
Germany and France holding talks with Russia this week in Paris
Biden and Blinken can’t stop embarrassing themselves on the world stage
— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) January 24, 2022
“As President Biden has said, military action by Russia could come at any time,” said one unnamed State Department spokesman.
“The United States Government will not be in a position to evacuate U.S. citizens in such a contingency,” added the spokesman, “so U.S. citizens currently present in Ukraine should plan accordingly, including by availing themselves of commercial options should they choose to leave the country.”
For Americans the prelude to possible war with Russia is reminiscent of the botched evacuation of US citizens and personnel from Afghanistan that the Biden administration failed to oversee properly last August.
The embassy in Kabul at that time put out a statement on the Internet that it could not guarantee safe passage for US citizens to the international airport there.
Instead citizens were requested to fill out a form online to request “assistance returning to the United States.”
“Afghanistan is lost … every terrorist around the world is cheering,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters in his home state of Kentucky according Reuters.
The State Department warned US citizens not to travel to Ukraine and issued orders to evacuate the families of the US Embassy personnel from the country while the embassy will remain open for the time being according to the New York Times.
“I think this is a prudent step,” William Taylor, a retired veteran diplomat who served twice as ambassador to Ukraine told the Times. “On the Russian side, there’s the continued buildup, the continued massing of troops.”
For anti-Russian Ukrainians, it means being left in the lurch to fight the Russians with no emergency airlifts or special visas to escape to the US as the administration seems bent on a long, costly war for Russia in Ukraine.
“The key to thwarting Russian ambitions is to prevent Moscow from having a quick victory and to raise the economic, political, and military costs by imposing economic sanctions, ensuring political isolation from the West, and raising the prospect of a prolonged insurgency that grinds away the Russian military,” Seth Jones, a political scientist, and Philip Wasielewski, a former CIA paramilitary officer, wrote in a Jan. 13 analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Studies according to the Associated Press.
President Biden has been accused of making a mess of the threatened invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, issuing confusing statements and appearing to accept the invasion as a foregone conclusion just as he accepted the Afghanistan fiasco.
“The Ukraine stumble was not the first time that [Biden’s] strategy has been impaired by its execution,” said the Guardian. “The withdrawal from Afghanistan was intended to be a decisive break with the past, extricating the US from its longest war so it could focus on its most important geopolitical challenge, the rapid rise of China.”
