President Says Ukrainian Capital Will Be a Target

WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Friday the United States has intelligence showing that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made a final decision to invade Ukraine, rejecting the final efforts of diplomacy.

“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to, intend to, attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days,” Mr. Biden said in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. “We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”

Asked whether he thinks that Mr. Putin is still wavering about whether to invade, Mr. Biden said: “I’m convinced he’s made the decision.” Later he added that his impression of Mr. Putin’s intentions is based on U.S. intelligence.

The president’s comments, the second in three days, are the clearest indications of just how close the world may be to a catastrophic conflict in Europe. Previously, the president and his top national security aides have said they did not know whether Mr. Putin had made a final decision to follow through with his threat of an invasion.

Still, Mr. Biden implored Russia to “choose diplomacy.”

“It is not too late to de escalate and return to the negotiating table,” Mr. Biden said, referring to planned talks between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister have agreed to talks next Wednesday. “If Russia takes military action before that day, it will be clear that they have slammed the door shut on diplomacy.”

Mr. Biden was more direct on Friday about his belief that war between Russia and Ukraine may be inevitable. But he also vowed that the United States and its allies are united behind imposing severe economic sanctions if Russia’s forces cross Ukraine’s borders.

The president spoke after he held another round of urgent, virtual talks with European leaders on Friday afternoon.

Tension in the region escalated as Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine called for a mass evacuation of the area on Friday, claiming Ukraine was about to attack, a dire development that Western officials denounced as Russia’s latest attempt to create a pretext for President Vladimir V. Putin to send tens of thousand of troops into Ukraine.

Senior American officials also said for the first time that they believe Russia was responsible for cyberattacks on Ukrainian banks this week. And they warned that they are bracing for possible cyberattacks by Russia on American targets if the United States and its allies impose tough sanctions on Russia.

Mr. Biden’s remarks follow a new assessment by American officials based in Europe that Russia has as many as 190,000 troops massed at the Ukrainian border and inside two pro-Moscow separatist regions — Donetsk and Luhansk.

Mr. Biden said just days ago that 150,000 Russian troops were ready to participate in an invasion. Friday’s assessment by the U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe indicated that the larger number includes military troops and other Russian-led or backed forces.

As unverified reports of Ukrainian attacks and acts of sabotage in the separatist regions filled Russian state media, Ukraine’s military intelligence warned on Friday night that Russian forces had mined “social infrastructure facilities in Donetsk.” The mines were part of an effort, the defense ministry said, to stage a false-flag attack and “create grounds for accusing Ukraine of terrorist attacks.”

Mr. Biden and the allies have warned for days that they believe Mr. Putin is prepared to stage fake attacks that could be used to justify an invasion. Mr. Putin insisted on Friday that he was prepared for further diplomacy, but Russian officials said the country’s military will conduct drills over the weekend that include the launch of ballistic and cruise missiles. The test of the country’s nuclear forces added to the sense of foreboding in the region.

“We are ready to go on the negotiating track under the condition that all questions will be considered together, without being separated from Russia’s main proposals,” Mr. Putin said in a news conference alongside his close ally President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, who was visiting Moscow.

KYIV, Ukraine — As fears of an Russian invasion of Ukraine grew, the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine called for the evacuation on Friday of every woman and child in the region, claiming that the Ukrainian military was about to launch a large-scale attack.

The head of Ukraine’s ministry of defense said the claim an attack was imminent was false, a ploy designed to inflame tensions and offer a pretext for Russia to invade. He made a direct appeal to people living in the region, telling them they were fellow Ukrainians and were under no threat from Kyiv.

The separatist leaders called for evacuation as state-controlled media in Russia released a steady stream of reports claiming the Ukrainian government was stepping up attacks on those breakaway regions — Donetsk and Luhansk.

The United States and its NATO allies have warned for days that Russia might use false reports out of eastern Ukraine about violence threatening ethnic Russians living there to justify an attack. The hyperbolic warnings from the separatists — who offered no proof of imminent danger — were greeted with a sense of urgency by the Ukrainian government.

The defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, urged Ukrainians in the separatist-held territories to ignore Russian propaganda that the Ukrainian government was going to attack them. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Ukraine is not your enemy.”

But Denis Pushilin, the pro-Moscow leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a secessionist state in Ukrainian territory, offered a starkly different version of what might be coming.

“Very soon, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky will order the military to go on an offensive, to implement a plan to invade the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics,” he said in a video posted online, offering no evidence.

“From today, Feb. 18, a mass organized transfer of the population to Russia is being organized,” he added. “Women, children, and the elderly will need to be evacuated first. We urge you to listen and make the right decision.” He noted that accommodation would be provided in Russia’s nearby Rostov region.

The leader of the separatists in Luhansk, Leonid Pasechnik, put out a similar statement on Friday urging people who are not in the military or “operating social and civilian infrastructure” to leave for Russia.

While Moscow and Kyiv have long offered wildly different narratives in the conflict, the call for some 700,000 people to flee the region and seek safety in Russia was a dramatic escalation. It remained unclear how many people were actually leaving the country.

Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has claimed that Ukraine is committing “genocide” in the eastern Donbas region and his ambassador to the United Nations has compared the government in Kyiv to Nazis.

On Friday night, reports of a major car bombing in the region and other attacks were broadcast across Russian state media. It was hard to independently verify the reports as access to Western journalists is severely restricted in the secessionist territory.

Social media was flooded with contradictory accounts and images that could not be immediately verified.

Some pictures posted online showed people lining up at cash machines, suggesting mass flight, while a Ukrainian official sent a video from what he said was a traffic camera in Donetsk, which did not show bus convoys or any signs of panic or evacuation.

Earlier in the day, Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said that Russia was looking for a pretext to attack Ukraine and exploit the deep tensions in the eastern region of Donbas.

“Starting several weeks ago, we acquired information that the Russian government was planning to stage a fabricated attack by Ukrainian military or security forces against Russian sovereign territory, or against Russian-speaking people in separatist-controlled territory, to justify military action against Ukraine,” he wrote, adding that international observers should “beware of false claims of ‘genocide.’”

KYIV, Ukraine — Without outright declaring war or taking action that would trigger the harsh sanctions promised by the West, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has once again succeeded in destabilizing Ukraine and making clear that Russia could wreck the country’s economy.

The evacuation announced last week of American, British and Canadian citizens has led to panic. Several international airlines have stopped flights into the country. Russian naval exercises in the Black Sea have exposed the vulnerability of Ukraine’s critical ports for commercial shipping.

And as for real estate?

“The number of requests is fewer and fewer every day,” said Pavlo Kaliuk, a freelance property broker in Ukraine’s capital, who used to sell and rent properties to clients from the United States, France, Germany and Israel. In November, when Russia first began posting troops along the country’s border, the deals quickly dried up.

The anxiety coursing through Kyiv is exactly what Mr. Putin hopes to achieve, according to Pavlo Kukhta, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of energy. “What they want to do is the equivalent of winning the war without firing a single bullet, by causing massive panic here,” Mr. Kukhta said.

Timofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former minister of economic development, said his institution has estimated that the crisis has already cost Ukraine “several billion dollars,” just in the past few weeks. War or a long siege would only worsen the situation.

The first major blow came Monday when two Ukrainian airlines said they were unable to acquire insurance for their flights, forcing Ukraine’s government to create a $592 million insurance fund to keep planes flying. On Feb. 11, London-based insurers had warned aviation companies that they would be unable to insure flights to Ukraine or those flying above its airspace. Dutch Airline KLM, which had a plane shot down above territory controlled by pro-Moscow Ukrainian rebels in 2014, responded by saying it would halt flights. Germany’s Lufthansa said it was considering a suspension.

But the American response to the crisis has also infuriated some people, whether by creating panic with alarmist warnings of an imminent invasion or the decision to evacuate some embassy staff from Kyiv and set up a temporary office in the western city of Lviv, close to the border with Poland.

“When someone decides to move the embassy to Lviv, they must understand that such news will cost the Ukrainian economy several hundred million dollars,” David Arakhamia, the leader of the governing Servant of the People’s Party, said in a television interview, adding: “Every day we count the losses of the economy. We can’t borrow in foreign markets because the rates there are crazy. Many exporters refuse us.”

The United States said on Friday that Russia had likely amassed as many as 190,000 troops near the borders of Ukraine and inside the separatist regions in the country’s east, significantly raising its estimate of Moscow’s troop buildup as the Biden administration tries to persuade the world of the imminent threat of an invasion.

The assessment was delivered in a statement by the U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, calling it “the most significant military mobilization in Europe since the Second World War.”

“We assess that Russia probably has massed between 169,000 and 190,000 personnel in and near Ukraine as compared with about 100,000 on Jan. 30,” the statement read. “This estimate includes military troops along the border, in Belarus and in occupied Crimea; Russian National Guard and other internal security units deployed to these areas; and Russian-led forces in eastern Ukraine.”

Russia has characterized the troop buildup as part of routine military exercises, including joint drills with Belarus, a friendly nation that lies along Ukraine’s northern border, close to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Those drills, which involve Russian troops from hundreds of miles to the east, are scheduled to end on Sunday.

Moscow has also announced large-scale drills in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and naval war games involving amphibious landing ships off Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, raising fears of a possible naval blockade.

The new U.S. assessment came after Ukraine called for an emergency meeting at the O.S.C.E., of which Russia is also a member, to demand Russia explain the buildup. The 57-nation body requires member states to provide prior warning of and information about certain military activities.

Russia has said the troop deployments do not meet the organization’s definition of “unusual and unscheduled military activities,” and has declined to provide answers.

U.S. estimates of Russia’s troop deployment have been rising steadily. In early January, Biden administration officials said that Russian forces numbered around 100,000. That figure grew to 130,000 in early February. Then, on Tuesday, President Biden put the number at 150,000 — with brigades typically based as far away as Siberia joining the force.

Allegations of a car bomb and unsubstantiated claims of an imminent attack by Ukrainian forces have heightened tensions in areas of Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists. The New York Times collected footage from the day to analyze some of the claims:

• Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine made unverified claims that Ukraine used an explosive to target the vehicle of one of their military leaders on Friday. Footage filmed at the scene by pro-Russian media outlets shows the damaged vehicle in flames.

• Earlier on Friday, separatist leaders had warned of an imminent attack by Ukrainian forces — an allegation for which there is no evidence, and which Ukraine has denied.

• Civilians were urged to evacuate, captured on camera forming lines at gas stations and ATMs and appearing to flee the region.

• Just after midnight on Saturday, verified footage showed another possible explosion, this time in Luhansk.

“It will also strengthen our interoperability with the Polish armed forces, boosting the credibility of our combined deterrence efforts and those of other NATO allies,” Mr. Austin said, referring to the M1A2 tank. He was speaking at a news conference in Warsaw with Poland’s defense minister.

The United States warned on Thursday that fresh shelling in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists could herald an invasion by Russia after weeks of tension.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said this week that the country was moving some of its forces back from the border with Ukraine, but Mr. Austin said that the reverse appeared to be true. Russian troops were moving closer to the border, increasing their logistical capacity and dispersing their forces, he said.

“All of the indicators continue to indicate that he will maintain the capability to launch an attack most any time,” Mr. Austin said.

Mr. Putin has sought to weaken NATO, but the weeks of tension over Ukraine have had the opposite effect, said Mr. Austin, who met with NATO leaders in Brussels on Tuesday.

“What Mr. Putin did not want was a stronger NATO on his flank, and that is exactly what he has today,” he said.

The significance of Mr. Austin’s announcement was the strong message it sent to Mr. Putin, said Samantha de Debendern, an expert on Eastern Europe at Chatham House, a British think tank.

“It is basically saying: ‘Not only are we not going to do any of the things that you asked us to do, we are actually reinforcing NATO’s presence on its eastern front,’” she said, referring to demands by Mr. Putin that NATO pull back troops from countries such as Poland that joined the alliance since 1997.

Two explosions were reported Friday near the city of Luhansk, capping off a volatile day in the pro-Moscow separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Multiple videos posted to the Telegram app showed what appeared to be a large, distant fire illuminating the night sky.

Several of the cellphone videos that recorded the scene were filmed around midnight, The New York Times confirmed. One video, filmed from an apartment building in Luhansk, showed the fire in the north of the city, in the direction of a gas pipeline and a gas compressor station.

Tatyana Bogorodko, the director general of Luganskgaz, a state-run local gas supplier, blamed the explosions on sabotage, according to pro-Russian news outlets, but she did not specify who she believed was responsible.

Other videos, filmed shortly after midnight on Saturday local time, showed damage to a pipeline. The cause of the damage was unclear.

As concerns grew in Europe over an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s foreign minister suggested for the first time on Friday that military action by Moscow could mean the end of Nord Stream 2, a natural-gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany.

“We in Germany are prepared to pay a high price economically. That’s why everything is on the table — also Nord Stream 2,” the minister, Annalena Baerbock, told the Munich Security Conference, the high-profile annual trans-Atlantic security gathering that is taking place from Friday to Sunday.

Ms. Baerbock’s comments departed from the German government’s public comments so far during the Ukraine crisis, which had refrained from explicitly mentioning the pipeline as part of a package of sanctions that Western countries would impose against Russia if it invades Ukraine. That has irked Germany’s allies, prompting some to question the resolve of Europe’s largest democracy to bear the cost of sanctions.

Nord Stream 2, which is not yet completed, is owned by Russia’s state-backed energy giant, Gazprom, and is a sign of Europe’s energy dependence on Russia.

It is one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in Europe today, a 746-mile pipeline stretching under the Baltic Sea from the Russian coast near St. Petersburg to Germany. The project has gone ahead in the face of opposition from the United States and most European countries.

Russia has decided not to send an official delegation to the Munich Security Conference for the first time in 20 years, which some consider a worrisome sign.

The embattled Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is expected to arrive on Saturday to seek support and solidarity, even after President Biden said on Thursday that he thought the Russians might invade Ukraine in the next few days.

Russia denies any intention of invading Ukraine, and a conference devoted to diplomacy will no doubt chew over any possibility that, in Churchill’s phrase, “Jaw-jaw might forestall war-war,” at least for now.

The American delegation to the conference, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, will include Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Mr. Blinken arrived overnight and said that he expected to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, sometime late next week, as long as Russia did not attack Ukraine.

Two founding members of the Soviet Union — Russia and Ukraine — are once again at a flash point. Here are some pivotal moments that have led to Russia’s troop buildup on its western border with Ukraine:

February 2014 — Protesters in Ukraine overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych, who was friendly to Russia’s interests. During the revolution, more than 100 people are killed in protests that centered on the main square in the capital Kyiv, often called the Maidan. The interim government that followed this pro-Western revolution eventually signs a trade agreement with the European Union that is seen as a first step toward EU membership.

April 2014 — Russia invades and then annexes the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Two secessionist regions, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the neighboring Luhansk People’s Republic, break off from Ukraine. The war continues in the eastern Ukrainian region known as Donbas. It then spreads west. Roughly 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians eventually die in the conflict. The front lines have barely shifted for years.

2014 and 2015 — Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany sign a series of cease-fire agreements known as the Minsk Accords. Many view these accords as ambiguous.

April 2019 — Former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky is elected by a large majority as president of Ukraine on a promise to restore Donbas to the country.

1922 — Russia and Ukraine became two of the founding members of the Soviet Union.

1932 and 1933 — A famine caused by Stalin’s policy of collectivization kills millions of people, mainly ethnic Ukrainians in a country that is known as the bread basket of the Soviet Union. The disaster is known as the Holodomor.

As rockets whistled across the night sky over the front line in eastern Ukraine, Kostyantyn Reutsky, a humanitarian volunteer, said he had arrived in the town of Kondrashivka around 3 a.m. on Friday.

He was there to check on vulnerable people, including a couple, Oleksandr and Kateryna. A rocket shell hit their home on Thursday around 9 p.m. They did not sleep at all during the night, and still could not find rest amid the stress and cold.

“The roof of the house was destroyed almost completely,” he said.

The couple have nowhere to go, he said, and are now living in single room that was undamaged in the attack. They have strung up blankets at its entrance to try to keep the bitter wind from biting.

While many in the region have experienced sporadic shelling, Mr. Reutsky said there were no military facilities in this part of the village, and during all the years of the war, he was told, no shells had previously fallen there.

But the region bears the scars of years of conflict. When two schools were struck by shells on Thursday, they added to the tally of over 750 schools damaged since the conflict began in 2014, according to the U.N. children’s agency.

“Attacks on kindergartens and schools have been a sad reality for children in eastern Ukraine over the past eight years,” the agency, UNICEF, said in a statement on Friday.

— Maria Varenikova

For weeks, as Russian troops streamed from across their vast nation to take up positions threatening Ukraine from three directions, the clearest public warning spoken by President Vladimir V. Putin came on Dec. 21.

If the West refused to accede to his sweeping demands to renegotiate the security architecture of Eastern Europe, Mr. Putin said, Russia would “take appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures and will have a tough response to their unfriendly steps.”

The phrase was repeated in a lengthy letter that Moscow sent to Washington and published on Thursday, which said that unless the United States agreed to its security demands, Russia would respond by implementing “measures of a military-technical character.”

Which raises a question: What are military-technical measures?

The phrase has a long history — even if its current usage is shrouded in the fog of the Kremlin’s opaque information campaign.

The idea of a “military-technical revolution” comes from Russian military writings of the 1980s, according to a study from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent research institute in Washington that focuses on military planning.

The term was widely used in the former Soviet Union not only to describe likely future developments in military techniques, but also to identify earlier eras when fundamental transformations of warfare had taken place.

In the current context, it is harder to divine what exactly Mr. Putin is signaling with the phrase.

Asked last month what Russia meant by military-technical means, the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, described them as weapons deployments.

Russian analysts have speculated that it could involve the deployment of modern Russian missiles that directly threaten the West — perhaps even in Latin America or on submarines off the American mainland. But the Kremlin has been deliberately vague.

“When we make decisions on this or that step, we always understand what we mean and what we are preparing for,” Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference on Jan. 14.

Greg Austin, who leads the Cyber, Space and Future Conflict Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, noted that Mr. Putin had made a distinction between “military” and “military-technical” during his Dec. 21 speech.

In an essay published this month, Mr. Austin wrote that “military-technical” could suggest actions that Russia could take without invading Ukraine. That, he wrote, includes possibilities like staging a naval blockade of the Ukrainian coast, enforcing a no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine, bombing Ukrainian weapons or missile-launch sites, or waging cyberattacks against Ukraine’s electric grid or other critical infrastructure.

In some of these cases, Mr. Austin wrote, Russia might cite similar measures taken by Western countries, such as no-fly zones enforced by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, or NATO’s bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia in 1999.

But Mr. Austin, like other observers who have tried to parse Mr. Putin’s use of the term, acknowledged that only one person knows what it means in this case: Mr. Putin himself.

At this moment of crescendo for the Ukraine crisis, it all comes down to what kind of leader President Vladimir V. Putin is.

In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great that his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff.

But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.

A large-scale invasion of Ukraine, many analysts point out, would be an enormous escalation compared with any of the actions that Mr. Putin has taken before. In 2014, the Kremlin’s subterfuge allowed Russian forces stripped of identifying markings to capture Crimea without firing a single shot. The proxy war that Mr. Putin fomented in Ukraine’s east allowed him to deny being a party to the conflict.

“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”

At home, Mr. Putin has always been keen to project the aura of a sober statesman, overruling the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.

And while he casts himself as Russia’s guarantor of stability, he could face stark economic headwinds from Western sanctions and social upheaval if there are casualties on the battlefield and among civilians.

Big American and European companies operating on the ground in Ukraine said Friday that they had contingency plans at the ready in case of a Russian invasion but so far had not ordered the relocation of employees.

Even as Western leaders turned up warnings that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia may order an attack on Ukraine, executives at the multinational companies, for the most part, don’t believe that Russian troops will actually follow through with a ground invasion, said Anna Derevyanko, the deputy director of the European Business Association.

“Companies have put in place contingency plans, but they do not believe something terrible is going to happen,” said Ms. Derevyanko, whose association includes Nestlé, BASF, ArcelorMittal, Bayer and over 1,000 European firms that employ more than two million people in Ukraine.

“If you ask business people, they believe that a physical invasion is a low-risk scenario,” she added. “There is no sense of panic.”

The prospect of cyberattacks, on the other hand, is more worrisome. Government websites, state-owned banks and parts of the nation’s infrastructure have battled online invasions byhackers, believed by Ukrainians to be Russians, looking to disable computers and steal data. European and American companies in Ukraine see digital attacks as one of the major threats they must deal with and have moved to strengthen their cybersecurity, Ms. Derevyanko said.

The IT Ukraine Association, which includes local and international tech companies, such as Sigma Software and the video game giant Ubisoft, said that the industry’s presence in the country had grown steadily since Russia’s devastating invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Companies in the tech industry, now worth $6.8 billion, have plans to ensure the security and safety of their employees in the event of “emergencies” as part of their business strategy, the association said in a statement.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine have accumulated strength, gained combat experience and is ready to defend the country and its population,” the statement continued. In turn, it said, tech companies’ response plans “are aimed at protecting talent and their business processes continuity.”

More than 90 percent of the tech companies surveyed this month assessed the risk of an escalation of the conflict as low to medium, the association added, noting that none had prepared for a full relocation.

The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine said that its 633 members, which include 3M, Toyota and Citibank, continued to do business but had contingency plans to continue working in the event of an emergency.

Most of the member companies made their plans long ago but continue to update and review them, said Andy Hunder, president of the business association.

Ms. Derevyanko, of the European Business Association, said that Ukraine was counting on continued foreign investment to help keep the economy stable. Multinationals are located around the country in agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, technology and logistics.

Ukraine’s economy had only started to recover in recent years from a debilitating blow after Moscow in 2014 annexed Crimea, and pro-Russian rebels seized swathes of the eastern Donbas region in Ukraine. Since then, Western allies have seeded Ukraine and businesses operating there with over $48 billion in bilateral and multilateral economic support.

This week, the United States pledged to strengthen Ukraine’s economy, after a statement by the Group of 7 industrial nations promising to do the same.

“For now, companies are saying they plan to continue business as usual,” said Ms. Derevyanko. But the situation could yet grow complicated, especially if major seaports and airports are blocked, thwarting exports and dealing a further blow to the economy.