Russians scoff at Western fears of War

Moscow: While the U.S. warns that Russia could invade Ukraine any day, the drumbeat of war is all but unheard in Moscow, where pundits and ordinary people alike don’t expect President Vladimir Putin to launch an attack on its ex-Soviet neighbor. The Kremlin has cast the U.S. warnings of an imminent attack as “hysteria” and “absurdity,” and many Russians believe that Washington is deliberately stoking panic and fomenting tensions to trigger a conflict for domestic reasons. Putin’s angry rhetoric about NATO’s plans to expand to Russia’s “doorstep” and its refusal to hear Moscow’s concerns has struck a chord with the public, tapping into a sense of betrayal by the West after the end of the Cold War and widespread suspicion about Western designs.

Speaking to reporters after President Joe Biden’s call with Putin on Saturday, Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov bemoaned what he described as U.S. “hysteria” about an allegedly imminent invasion, saying that the situation has “reached the point of absurdity.” The U.S. says that Russia has concentrated over 130,000 troops east, north and south of Ukraine and has the necessary firepower to launch an attack at any moment.

Russian officials have angrily denied any plans to attack Ukraine and dismissed Western concerns about the buildup near the country, arguing that Moscow is free to deploy its troops wherever it likes on its national territory. “We don’t understand why they are spreading clearly false information about Russian intentions,” Ushakov said about the U.S. warnings of an imminent attack.

In 2014, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula following the ouster of the country’s Moscow-friendly president and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, Donbas, where more than 14,000 people have been killed in fighting.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has taken a more combative tone, denouncing Washington’s warnings of an imminent Russian attack on Ukraine as “war propaganda” by the U.S. and some of its allies. Zakharova alleged that the U.S. needs a war at any price,” charging that “provocations, disinformation and threats represent its favorite methods of solving its own problems.” She denounced U.S. intelligence claims about an alleged “false flag” operation mounted by Russia to create a pretext for invading Ukraine, comparing them to then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 speech before the U.N. Security Council, in which he made the case for war against Iraq, citing faulty intelligence information claiming Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. “The U.S. politicians lied, are lying and will keep lying,” Zakharova said. —AP