(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Chief Sergei Naryshkin on Monday accused Western media outlets and governments of spreading war propaganda about an impending assault on Ukraine.
Naryshkin said the US State Department has devised the war propaganda with the hope that Ukraine, fearing a Russian invasion, will preemptively attack Russia and start a war, One America News Network reported.
On the same day, three anonymous Western officials described the situation on the ground as a “very dark one with storm clouds gathering on Ukrainian border,” CNBC-TV18 reported.
The Biden administration’s predictions about an imminent Russian invasion have so far failed to materialize, with the Feb. 16 invasion date coming and going without movement.
America and Western allies, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other hand, have accused each other of launching false flags and psychological operations intended to bait each other into war.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that a pro-Russian group bombed a Ukrainian kindergarten as part of a “false flag operation designed to discredit the Ukrainians, designed to create a pretext, a spurious provocation for Russian action,” the Scottish Sun reported.
Two main issues animate the border dispute: Ukraine’s admission into NATO and the status of majority-Russian territories in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
In the Minsk Protocol, Ukraine agreed to give the Russian-speaking territories in the Donbas region greater autonomy in their local affairs, but the ethnic Russians in Ukraine and the Kremlin have asserted that Ukraine has not adhered to its promises.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the major issue at stake is Ukraine’s entrance into NATO and the presence of Western missiles on the Ukrainian border, only a few minutes flight to Moscow.