Is Whitehall convinced Russia will invade Ukraine?

Senior UK government officials believe that Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine after weeks of massing troops on the neighbouring country’s border, insiders have warned.

Whitehall officials said earlier this week that the government thought the Russian president had not yet decided whether to launch an incursion. But “yesterday sources suggested that this analysis had changed in the past 24 hours”, according to The Times. “He’s going to do it, and it’s going to be horrendous,” an insider told the paper.

War footing

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) shared a two-minute clip on social media on Thursday showing “the ‘axis of advance’ of Putin's troops and the military bases from where an invasion could be launched”, said the Daily Mail.

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The ministry warned that Russia had massed troops on Ukraine's northern border in a way that “directly threatens Kyiv”. There would be “considerable” civilian casualties in the event of an invasion, the report said, and Putin “would be willing” to sustain thousands of losses “to get what he wants”.

The MoD mapped a series of possible routes Russian soldiers could take to claim much of the east of the country.

The report “also echoed warnings from Nato and Washington that there is ‘no evidence’ to back up Russian claims troops are being withdrawn from the border regions”, the newspaper added.

A UK government spokesperson said: “All the information we have suggests Russia could be planning an invasion of Ukraine at any moment without further warning.

“However, there is still opportunity for de-escalation, and for President Putin to step back and avoid a bloody and unnecessary war.”

But with sources telling The Times that the government believes Putin has decided to invade, de-escalation hopes are fading.

‘False flag operation’

The insider claims to The Times “followed a gloomy briefing by Western officials, who said Russia’s military build-up was continuing ‘at pace’”, according to the paper. The officials reportedly warned that “nearly half” of Russia’s deployed battalion tactical groups were within 30 miles of the border.

Boris Johnson has hit out at Putin following the bombing of a nursery school in Stanytsia Luhanska, a village in eastern Ukraine's disputed Donbas region. The shelling, in which two civilians were injured, “is likely to have been carried out by Russian separatists but the Kremlin blamed Ukraine”, the Daily Mail reported.

Johnson told reporters that the attack “was a false flag operation designed to discredit the Ukrainians, designed to create a pretext, a spurious provocation for Russian action”.

“We fear very much that that is the kind of thing we will see more of over the next few days,” the prime minster said.

However, Sky News's Moscow correspondent Diana Magnay pointed out that “the shelled kindergarten... is on the Ukrainian side of the line of contact”.

“Terrible as this is,” she said, “it is not an illustration of a false flag operation” – one in which a group carries out an attack on its own forces as a pretence for launching an assault. “That would look more like an attack within the separatist republics, staged by the separatists, where they pin the blame on Ukraine.”

Allied forces

Johnson today joined a phone call meeting hosted by Biden, alongside the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Canada, the EU and Nato, to discuss the developing situation along the Ukrainian border.

The US president warned yesterday that an attack could take place imminently and that his administration also had “reason to believe” that the nursery bombing might be part of a “false flag operation to have an excuse to go in”.

“Every indication we have is they’re prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine,” Biden told reporters in Washington. “My sense is it will happen in the next several days.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a UN Security Council meeting that US intelligence “indicates clearly that [Russian] forces, including ground troops, aircraft, ships, are preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days”.

“We don’t know precisely how things will play out, but here’s what the world can expect to see unfold. In fact, it’s unfolding right now,” he warned.

“It could be a fabricated so-called terrorist bombing inside Russia. The invented discovery of the mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake – even a real – attack using chemical weapons.”

Germany Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Putin in Moscow earlier this week, after a trip to Kyiv for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “strengthen Berlin's support in the face of Russian aggression”, said Deutsche Welle (DW).

Following the meeting with Putin, the chancellor told reporters that a build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border “can be seen as a threat”, but added: “We now hear that more troops are being withdrawn that is a positive signal and we hope more will follow.”

Germany is in a tricky position as both a member of Nato and an important trading partner for Russia.

While Berlin has “repeatedly vowed its support for Ukrainian sovereignty”, said DW, Scholz's government has been “less keen on threats of abandoning the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that would bring Russian fuel directly into Germany”.