US warns more than 130,000 Russian troops amassed outside Ukraine

Some airlines have cancelled flights to the Ukrainian capital as the country’s president sought to project confidence in the face of US warnings of a possible invasion within days by a Russian force said to have swelled to more than 130,000 troops.

President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to US leader Joe Biden for about an hour on Sunday, insisting that Ukrainians have the country under “safe and reliable protection” against a feared attack by a far stronger Russian military.

The White House said both leaders agreed to keep pushing both deterrence and diplomacy to try to stave off a feared Russian military offensive.

The Biden administration has become increasingly outspoken about its concerns that Russia will stage an incident in the coming days that will create a false pretext for an invasion of Ukraine.

US and European intelligence findings in recent days have sparked worries that Russia may try to target a scheduled Ukrainian military exercise scheduled for Tuesday in eastern Ukraine to launch a “false-flag operation”, according to sources.

American intelligence officials believe targeting the military exercise is just one of multiple options that Russia has weighed as a possibility for a false-flag operation.

The White House has underlined that it does not know with certainty if Russian president Vladimir Putin has made a final determination to launch an invasion.

Moscow’s forces are massing on Ukraine’s north, east and south in what the Kremlin insists are military exercises.

A US official has updated the Biden administration’s estimate for how many Russian forces are now staged near Ukraine’s borders to more than 130,000, up from the 100,000-plus that American officials have cited publicly in previous weeks.

Mr Zelensky has repeatedly played down the US warnings, questioning the increasingly strident statements from American officials in recent days that Russia could be planning to invade as soon as midweek.

“We understand all the risks, we understand that there are risks,” he said in a broadcast on Saturday.

“If you, or anyone else, has additional information regarding a 100% Russian invasion starting on the 16th, please forward that information to us.”

But while Mr Zelensky has cautioned against panic which could undermine Ukraine’s economy, he and his civilian and military leaders also are preparing defences, soliciting and receiving a flow of arms from the US and other Nato members.

A military cargo aircraft carrying US-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and ammunition from Nato member Lithuania landed on Sunday, bolstering the country’s defences against any attack by air.

Mr Zelensky wore military olive drab at a drill with tanks and helicopters near Ukraine’s border with Russian-annexed Crimea this weekend.

The Russians have deployed missile, air, naval and special operations forces, as well as supplies to sustain an invasion.

This week, Russia moved six amphibious assault ships into the Black Sea, augmenting its capability to land on the coast.

Mr Putin denies any intention of attacking Ukraine. Russia is demanding that the West keep former Soviet countries out of Nato. It also wants Nato to refrain from deploying weapons near its border and to roll back alliance forces from wastern Europe – demands flatly rejected by the West.

Mr Biden and Mr Putin spoke for more than an hour on Saturday, but the White House offered no suggestion that the call diminished the threat of an imminent war in Europe.

Reflecting the West’s concerns, Dutch airline KLM has cancelled flights to Ukraine until further notice. The Ukrainian charter airline SkyUp said on Sunday its flight from Madeira, Portugal, to Kyiv was diverted to the Moldovan capital.

Ukraine’s air traffic safety agency Ukraerorukh issued a statement declaring the airspace over the Black Sea to be a “zone of potential danger” and recommended that planes avoid flying over the sea from February 14-19.

The Putin-Biden conversation, following a call between Mr Putin and French president Emmanuel Macron earlier in the day, came at a critical moment for what has become the biggest security crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

US officials believe they have mere days to prevent an invasion and enormous bloodshed in Ukraine.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz will fly to Kyiv on Monday to meet with Mr Zelensky before heading to Moscow on Tuesday to meet Mr Putin.

While the US and Nato have made clear they do not intend to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, any invasion and resulting punishing sanctions promised by the US and other countries could reverberate far beyond the former Soviet republic, affecting energy supplies, global markets and the power balance in Europe.

The United States is pulling most of its staff from the embassy in Kyiv and urged all American citizens to leave Ukraine immediately. Britain joined other European nations in telling its citizens to leave.

Mr Biden has bolstered the US military presence in Europe as reassurance to allies on Nato’s eastern flank. The 3,000 additional soldiers ordered to Poland come on top of 1,700 who are on their way there.

The US army is also shifting 1,000 soldiers from Germany to Romania, which like Poland shares a border with Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly leader was driven from office by a popular uprising.

Moscow responded by annexing the Crimean Peninsula and then backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed more than 14,000 people.

A 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany helped halt large-scale battles, but regular skirmishes have continued, and efforts to reach a political settlement have stalled.