The United Kingdom’s Defense Secretary, Ben Wallace, warned Wednesday, February 16, that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was still possible, despite Moscow’s announcement that it was withdrawing its forces.
The US government issued a similar declaration, noting in a White House statement that “Russia is still able to invade Ukraine under invented pretexts.”
During an interview with Sky News in Brussels, Belgium, where he attended a meeting of NATO defense ministers, Wallace emphasized that there was no evidence of a Russian withdrawal and that the deployment of heavy weapons and field hospitals gave evidence of an invasion. Widely.
What we haven’t seen is evidence of withdrawal confirmed by the Kremlin. In fact, we’ve seen a continued focus on things like field hospitals and the deployment of strategic weapons systems like Iskander missiles.”
Wallace stated: “We will judge them by their actions, and if we want to build confidence in trying to de-escalate this incident, we need to make sure we don’t mobilize forces at the same time and that’s what we still see. Until we see a proper de-escalation, we need to be careful. “.
The defense minister said Moscow’s intention was to force NATO to accept its security proposals, which include not agreeing to Ukraine’s membership and not expanding eastward.
According to Lass, despite the Kremlin’s assurances that it did not want the invasion and that it had partially withdrawn its forces, Ukraine remains besieged.
“From Ukraine’s point of view, they are obviously surrounded by a very large force of ready forces…Readiness is one of the first signs you always have about how serious a country is,” he said. Judge with your own eyes the scale of this Russian deployment on the borders of Ukraine and, in fact, all the press conferences held by President Putin.
Russia announced, on Wednesday, that it had ended military exercises in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula it annexed in 2014, and thus is withdrawing its forces.
This announcement came a day after he announced that some of his soldiers near the Ukrainian border are returning to their bases. However, the ongoing large-scale Russian-Belarusian military exercises will continue until February 20.
* Aisha Sandoval Laguna contributed to this article.
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