talks between Russia and the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0and its Western allies this week in Europe aimed at heading off the escalating crisis made little progress.<\/p>\nWhite House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday said the U.S. intelligence community has not made an assessment that the Russians, who have massed some 100,000 troops on Ukraine\u2019s border, have definitively decided to take a military course of action.<\/p>\n
But Sullivan said Russia is laying the groundwork to invade under false pretenses should Putin decide to go that route. He said the Russians have been planning \u201csabotage activities and information operations\u201d that accuse Ukraine of prepping for its own imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
He said this is similar to what the Kremlin did in the lead-up to Russia\u2019s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that had been under Ukraine\u2019s jurisdiction since 1954.<\/p>\n
The Crimea crisis came at moment when Ukraine was looking to strengthen ties with the West. Russia had stepped up propaganda that Ukraine\u2019s ethnic Russians were being oppressed in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Russia has long been accused of using disinformation as a tactic against adversaries in conjunction with military operations and cyberattacks. In 2014, Russian state media tried to discredit pro-Western protests in Kyiv as \u201cfomented by the U.S. in cooperation with fascist Ukrainian nationalists\u201d and promoted narratives about Crimea\u2019s historical ties to Moscow, according to a report by Stanford University\u2019s Internet Observatory.<\/p>\n
Efforts to directly influence Ukrainians appear to have continued during the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, in which at least 14,000 people have died. The Associated Press reported in 2017 that Ukrainian forces in the east were constantly receiving text messages warning that they would be killed and their children would be made orphans.<\/p>\n
Nina Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Washington-based Wilson Center, said Russia\u2019s disinformation efforts have evolved between the lead-up to its annexation of Crimea and now. This time, the Kremlin appears to be driving anti-Ukraine narratives with top officials making bellicose public statements, said Jankowicz, author of \u201cHow To Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe officials are setting the tone for the state media and they\u2019re just running with it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
So-called \u201ctroll farms\u201d that post fake comments are less influential in part because social media companies have gotten better at stopping them, she said. Russian efforts on social media often play on existing doubts in Ukrainian society about whether the U.S. will support Ukraine in a conflict and whether the West can be trusted, she said.<\/p>\n
The U.S. intelligence community has taken note of a buildup on social media by Russian influencers justifying intervention by emphasizing deteriorating human rights in Ukraine, suggesting an increased militancy of Ukrainian leaders and blaming the West for escalating tensions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw this playbook in 2014,\u201d Sullivan told reporters on Thursday. \u201cThey are preparing this playbook again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Russians, while maintaining they don\u2019t plan to invade Ukraine, are demanding that the U.S. and NATO provide written guarantees that the alliance will not expand eastward. The U.S. has called such demands nonstarters but said that it\u2019s willing to negotiate with Moscow about possible future deployments of offensive missiles in Ukraine and putting limits on U.S. and NATO military exercises in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned on Friday that Moscow wouldn\u2019t wait indefinitely for the Western response, saying he expects the U.S. and NATO to provide a written answer next week.<\/p>\n
Lavrov described Moscow\u2019s demands for binding guarantees that NATO will not embrace Ukraine or any other former Soviet nations, or station its forces and weapons there, as essential for the progress of diplomatic efforts to defuse soaring tensions over Ukraine.<\/p>\n
He argued that NATO\u2019s deployments and drills near Russia\u2019s borders pose a security challenge that must be addressed immediately.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have run out of patience,\u201d Lavrov said at a news conference. \u201cThe West has been driven by hubris and has exacerbated tensions in violation of its obligations and common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON:\u2014 U.S. intelligence officials have determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct \u201ca false-flag operation\u201d in eastern Ukraine, according to the White House. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday the intelligence findings show Russia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":409755,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-409754","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409756,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409754\/revisions\/409756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}