Russia and U.S. to Face Off at United Nations as Ukraine Standoff Continues

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The United States and Russia prepared for confrontation Monday at the United Nations Security Council over the Ukraine crisis, with the Americans vowing to make the Russians justify their massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders and Kremlin diplomats dismissing the meeting as farcical theatrics.

The meeting of the 15-nation council, requested by the United States last week, represents the highest-profile arena for the two powers to sway world opinion over Ukraine. The tensions surrounding the former Soviet republic have brought U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point since the Cold War.

“Our voices are unified in calling for the Russians to explain themselves,” the American ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on ABC’s “This Week” about the meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York.

“We’re going to go in the room prepared to listen to them,” she said in the Sunday interview, “but we’re not going to be distracted by their propaganda, and we’re going to be prepared to respond to any disinformation that they attempt to spread during this meeting.”

As one of the five permanent members of the council — along with Britain, China, France and the United States — Russia has the power to veto any decision by the majority. But it cannot block the meeting itself.

Russian diplomats have ridiculed the meeting as part of a manufactured contretemps over what they call unjustified Western fears, instigated by the United States, that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. The Russians have also seized on complaints by Ukraine’s president and others that the Americans are needlessly sowing panic.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy permanent representative at the United Nations, appeared to mock Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s remarks on Sunday in a Twitter post, saying she viewed the Security Council as “a club of worried people with US telling them what to worry about.”

Mr. Putin, who has not spoken publicly about Ukraine since December, maintained his silence.

His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday that Mr. Putin would state his views on the situation “as soon as he determines it to be necessary.”

“I can’t give you an exact date,” Mr. Peskov said. Russian officials continued to maintain they were not at fault for the rising tensions, insisting that the United States was fabricating the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That was a rare point of common ground with Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has also blamed the United States for needlessly sowing “panic” in Ukraine.

“To our regret, the American news media has been publishing a great amount of unverified, distorted and deliberately false and provocative information about what is happening in Ukraine and around it in recent months,” Mr. Peskov said.

Russia has sent more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in recent weeks, part of an increasingly aggressive posture by Mr. Putin to protect and enlarge what he sees as Russia’s rightful sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The Pentagon said on Friday that Russia had amassed enough forces to stage a full-scale invasion of Ukraine at a time of its choosing.

The Kremlin has accused the NATO alliance of threatening Russia and has demanded that it never admit Ukraine as a member. The possibility of a diplomatic solution has remained unclear at best.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, will have a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, but there are no plans at the moment to arrange an in-person meeting, Maria V. Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the ministry, said on Monday.

The Biden administration has said it wants a peaceful outcome to the crisis but is preparing for the possibility of what American military commanders have said would be a devastating armed conflict in Ukraine. The administration has vowed to respond with crippling economic sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will speak in a phone call on Monday, a day before Mr. Johnson makes a visit to Ukraine as his government attempts to defuse the escalating crisis with both diplomacy and deterrents.

Britain will propose legislation this week to let ministers impose a wider range of sanctions on Russia in the event of a new invasion of Ukraine, the British foreign secretary said on Sunday.

The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, discussed the plan in an interview with the broadcaster Sky News, presenting it as part of a broad range of efforts to deter further aggression from Mr. Putin. Britain is already supplying defensive weapons to Ukraine and has offered to increase its troop deployments elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The offer to bolster troops was designed to “signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, said on Monday during a visit to Hungary.

The new legislation would seek to broaden Britain’s current sanctions so there would be “nowhere to hide” for oligarchs and “any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia,” Ms. Truss said.

Britain has long been a financial hub for Russia’s wealthy and well-connected, with one British parliamentary report describing London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian money.

While the British Parliament typically takes weeks or months to pass a bill, emergency procedures allow it to legislate in as little as a day under some circumstances.

The call between the British and Russian leaders comes at a crucial moment for Mr. Johnson, whose political future remains uncertain after weeks of media reports that parties were hosted at Downing Street when the rest of the country was under lockdown restrictions.

Mr. Johnson’s visit to Ukraine on Tuesday will happen a day after a potentially explosive British government investigation into those reports was delivered to the prime minister.

KYIV, Ukraine — A bomb is about to go off.

Callers have communicated some variation of those words to the police in Ukraine at least 300 times in the past month, a spate of fake bomb threats that officials say is designed to sow panic and fear.

With tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed at its borders and the West warning that war could break out any day, the bomb threats have added to the growing sense of anxiety in the nation of 44 million.

While the Pentagon warned on Friday that Russia had now amassed enough troops to launch a full-scale invasion of the country, analysts have said that Russian aggression aimed at destabilizing the government could come in many forms. And it is the collapse of the state from within — abetted by Russian efforts — that Ukrainian officials have called the most clear and present danger.

The rate of bomb threats in January in Ukraine was six times higher than the average for last year.

The Ukrainian police say they have checked more than 3,000 buildings since the beginning of January in response to more than 300 phoned-in bomb threats. So far the threats have all turned out to be fake — causing disruption but no damage or loss of life.

In a statement, the country’s security service said the goal was obvious: creating chaos, stirring fear and undermining the government.

The threats have been mostly aimed at schools and shopping malls, forcing evacuations and closures and in some cases keeping children out of classes for days.

Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, wrote on social media that the fake bomb alerts were mostly coming from Russia, from Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine and from Russian allies, including Belarus.

The threats come as Ukraine braces for more cyberattacks — which could range from efforts to cripple the country’s infrastructure to propaganda campaigns aimed at sowing fear and confusion.

A Ukrainian government website was recently hacked and a message was posted: “Be afraid and expect the worst.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly expressed his concern that internal destabilization posed perhaps an even greater danger than an invasion. Panic, he has said, puts the economy in danger.

It is this concern that prompted him to publicly call on the United States and other European leaders to cool their talk of war being imminent. At the same time, he has blamed Russia for the bomb threats and efforts to cause turmoil within Ukraine.

“Why are you doing this?” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in comments directed at Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, in which he mentioned both the military buildup at the border and the flurry of bomb threats. “To threaten us? What is this sadomasochism? What is the pleasure of this? Of someone being afraid?”

Russian officials have repeatedly denied meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs. And they say they have also been dealing with their own wave of bomb threats, which have forced Russian schools and shopping centers to evacuate tens of thousands of people. They have blamed Ukraine for the surge.

In Ukraine, the fake bomb alerts have disrupted classes at dozens of schools, and some Ukrainians are blaming the government for the problem.

“It’s getting scary,” said Anastasia Kuznetsova, a parent in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine. Her 9-year-old daughter could not go to school for nearly two weeks this month because of repeated bomb threats to the building.

Olena Ronzhyna, mother of a 12-year-old from Cherkasy, in central Ukraine, said people were upset and blaming the government.

“Children have been home for almost a month,” she said.

Yet Ms. Ronzhyna believes that if Russia is hoping to damage Ukraine by undermining trust in its government, it will not work. Ukrainians have always taken great pride in their deep distrust of their government, and they relish criticizing it harshly and openly.

“We never trust any of our governments,” she said. “Starting from the first day after an election.”

— Maria Varenikova

More than a month of bluster and posturing, menacing military maneuvers and high-level diplomatic meetings has not made the security crisis gripping Europe any easier to assess.

Just a week after top diplomats from the United States and Russia sat down in Geneva on Jan. 21 to seek a way of de-escalating tensions around Ukraine, the Pentagon warned that Russia had amassed a fighting force large enough to attack its neighbor, a nation of 44 million, on a scale and at a time of its choosing. That could include a full-scale invasion, which would be likely to result in fierce fighting and potentially the worst bloodshed on the continent since the end of World War II.

“You can imagine what that might look like in dense urban areas, along roads and so on and so forth,” said Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday. “It would be horrific. It would be terrible.”

The U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, described an array of Russian infantry troops, artillery and rockets assembled at the Ukrainian border, which he said “far and away exceeds what we would typically see them do for exercises.”

Still, Mr. Austin said, “There is still time and space for diplomacy.”

No one is sure what Mr. Putin’s intentions are, and trying to divine them is at the heart of the uncertainty surrounding the crisis.

His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday that Mr. Putin would state his views on the situation “as soon as he determines it to be necessary.”

“I can’t give you an exact date,” Mr. Peskov said.

Mr. Putin has not spoken in public about Ukraine since Dec. 23. During that time, the Biden administration has moved to rally Western nations to demonstrate that the cost of military aggression would be severe and swiftly felt.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and member nations are not bound to come to its defense, but the United States has placed 8,500 troops on high alert to be dispatched to Eastern Europe to support allies nervous that Russian aggression might not stop in Ukraine.

American officials also announced last week that they were making plans to impose sanctions on some of Russia’s largest financial institutions — penalties that could disrupt Russia’s economy in ways that would go far beyond previous Western actions.

The United States and Germany are also increasing their warnings that natural gas would not flow through a new $11 billion pipeline from Russia to Germany if Russia were to invade Ukraine.

Still, there is concern that Mr. Putin may be willing to pay a high price to bring Ukraine back into what he sees as Russia’s natural sphere of influence.

In July, he wrote a 5,000-word essay expanding on his frequently voiced conviction that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”

And at the center of the current maelstrom, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sought on Friday to offer the perspective of a nation where conflict is not theoretical, but a daily reality.

About 14,000 people have been killed in the breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, where the Ukrainian military has been at war with Russia-backed separatists since 2014.

To speak of war as imminent was both wrong and dangerous, Mr. Zelensky said. It could result in economic and social instability that could itself cause the state to struggle to survive.

“We don’t need panic,” he said.

NOVI YARYLOVYCHI BORDER CROSSING, Ukraine — On the other side of this border in northern Ukraine, not visible through the thick pine and birch forests that crowd the E-95 highway but noticeable to passing truckers, a force is gathering in Belarus more potent than anything seen in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, officials and military analysts say.

Russia has deployed tanks and artillery, fighter jets and helicopters, advanced rocket systems and troops by the thousands all across Belarus, augmenting a fighting force that already envelopes Ukraine like a horseshoe on three sides. Russia says the troops have deployed for military exercises scheduled to commence next month, but the buildup in Belarus could presage an attack from a new vector, one in proximity to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

With much of Ukraine’s military might concentrated in the country’s east — where a war with Russian-backed separatists has raged for eight years — military analysts and Ukraine’s own generals say it will be difficult for the country to muster the forces necessary to defend its northern border.

“As a result of Russia taking control over Belarus, 1,070 kilometers of our border with Belarus became a threat,” said Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, referring to a distance of about 665 miles. “This is not a threat from Belarus — Ukraine has a very warm attitude toward the Belarusian people — but a threat from Russia moving through Belarus.”

Russia turned down the temperature on another potential provocation in Western Europe on Saturday, backing out of a plan to conduct naval exercises next week in international waters off Ireland’s coast, which had drawn protests from Irish fishing groups and the Irish government.

The naval drills were set to take place 150 miles off Ireland’s southwest coast — outside its territorial waters but within Ireland’s exclusive economic zone, an area where the country has sovereign rights over marine resources.

Fishing groups raised concerns that the activity could disrupt marine life and jeopardize an important region for their trade. One organization had planned to peacefully protest the exercises.

Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, described the proposed drills in an interview last week with the Irish public broadcaster RTE as “simply not welcome and not wanted right now.”

While acknowledging that Russia’s plans did not breach the international law of the sea, he said in a statement that his department had raised several concerns with the Russian authorities “in light of the current political and security environment in Europe.”

Moscow then decided to move the exercises outside the Irish exclusive economic zone “as a gesture of good will,” the Russian ambassador to Ireland, Yuriy Filatov, said in a statement released on Saturday. Mr. Coveney said on Twitter that he welcomed Russia’s response.

The U.S. military has noted signs that Russia and its proxies are stirring up discord and confusion far from Ukraine to distract the United States and its European partners.

Russian surveillance aircraft last week flew near Al Tanf, a military outpost in Syria near the Jordanian border where some 200 American troops are training allied Syrian militia members. Two Russian warships are in the Red Sea waiting to steam into the eastern Mediterranean, where an American aircraft carrier is conducting a naval exercise.

In West Africa’s Sahel region, supporters of a military coup in Burkina Faso took to the streets this week waving Russian flags, showing their desire to pivot away from France, the former colonial power, and toward Moscow.

French officials suggested that the Russian Embassy may have paid the supporters to wave flags, as the Russians have done in Mali, a country north of Burkina Faso that recently signed a deal to bring in several hundred Russian mercenaries to help combat a growing Islamist insurgency there. France and several other European countries operating in Mali have strenuously opposed the country’s plan to recruit mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked firm.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Sunday that Russia would seek clarity from NATO on its intentions to follow through with certain Kremlin requests to alter its approach to security, days after the United States and its allies delivered a formal rejection to Moscow’s demands NATO retreat from Eastern Europe and bar Ukraine from joining the alliance.

Mr. Lavrov’s statement, delivered in an interview with Russia’s main government television channel, indicated that while Moscow was displeased with the Western responses, as expected, there was still some flicker of hope for further diplomacy.

Through the foreign ministry, Mr. Lavrov said, an official request was sent Sunday to both NATO and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, a European security alliance of which Russia is a member, “with an urgent demand to explain how they intend to fulfill their obligation not to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of others.”

“If they do not intend to, then they must explain why,” he added. “This will be the key question in determining our further proposals, which we will report to Russia’s president,” he said.

While Mr. Lavrov did not indicate what specific issue in the NATO responses was unclear, the Kremlin has been highly critical of NATO’s so-called open-door policy of granting membership to former Communist bloc countries without taking Russia’s security concerns into account. In his remarks Sunday, Mr. Lavrov reiterated a frequent Kremlin complaint that NATO in the years since the Soviet collapse had crept ever closer to Russia’s border.

“Now they’ve come up to Ukraine, and they want to drag that country in,” he said. “Though everyone understands that Ukraine is not ready and will make no contribution to strengthening NATO security.”

Though Ukraine has been promised a path to NATO membership, Western officials openly acknowledge that the country is years away from membership. But even with roughly 130,000 Russian troops parked on the border with Ukraine and Moscow threatening unspecified “military-technical” measures should its demands not be met, neither the United States nor NATO has budged in its contention that any country that wishes to join can do so if it meets the requirements, no matter Russia’s objections.

While the United States and its allies have rejected the core of Russia’s demands, they have offered second-tier proposals meant to lower the temperature that Moscow has indicated it would be open to discussing.

In remarks last week, Mr. Lavrov was largely dismissive of the American and NATO responses to its demands, which were delivered in writing as requested by the Kremlin to the foreign ministry last week. But he said some proposals “contained kernels of rationality,” like limitations on short and medium range missiles.

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Residents in this frontline port city observed a moment of silence last week for those killed by rocket fire there seven years ago.

The shelling, on Jan. 24, 2015, killed 30 people, nearly all civilians, and wounded more than 100, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The group traced at least 19 rockets to separatist-controlled territory. Mariupol is 14 miles of the front line of a conflict between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists that continues today.

“We witnessed it all,” said Natalia Nikolaevna, a 68-year-old resident of Mariupol. “My husband had a cut in his leg. I had shrapnel in my head,” she said, recalling the rocket attack.

“My soul is crying,” she added. “We are afraid of everything now.”

As fears of an escalation with Russia intensify, soldiers at a memorial ceremony — who have for years fought in the continuing conflict with Russia-backed separatists — resolved to defend the city if it comes to that.

“You see what’s happening at the border now? We’re getting ready,” said Volodymyr, a Ukrainian Marine commander who asked that his full name be withheld for security reasons. “But I think Ukraine will prevail.”