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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the decision by Russia and Belarus to extend military exercises that were due to conclude on Sunday shows that Moscow is following the “playbook” leading to an invasion of Ukraine.
“It tells us that the playbook we laid out, I laid out at the UN Security Council last week about Russia trying to create a series of provocations as justifications for aggression against Ukraine, is going forward,” Blinken said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said the decision to continue the exercises was made “in connection with the increase in military activity near the external borders” of Russia and Belarus and because of rising tensions in the Donbas region, where Russian-backed rebels are clashing with Ukrainian forces.
Khrenin said President Alexander Lukashenko and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, decided to “to continue testing the response forces of the union state.”
Blinken said continuing the joint-military exercises in Belarus, which borders Ukraine to the north, is aggravating already heightened tensions over the standoff.
“We’ve seen that over the last few days. Now they’re justifying the continuation of exercises, exercises in quotation marks that they said would end now,” he said.
“The continuation indefinitely of those, quote, unquote, exercises, on the situation in eastern Ukraine, a situation that they created by continuing to ramp up tensions,” the US’ top diplomat said.
Blinken said that Putin has been bolstering the troops stationed along Ukraine’s border over the past few months and now has a force of more than 150,000 amassed.
“So all of this along with the false flag operations we’ve seen unfold over the weekend tells us the playbook we laid out is moving forward,” he said.
The US has warned that Russia would stage a false flag operation involving a bogus attack on Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine as a pretext to launch an invasion.
Blinken also defended the decision by the Biden administration to hold off on sanctioning Russia until an attack occurs as it leaves the door open for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.
He said all indications point to Putin launching an invasion and reiterated President Biden’s belief, based on intelligence, that Putin has made the decision.
”But until the tanks are actually rolling and the planes are flying, we will use every opportunity and every minute we have to see if diplomacy can still dissuade President Putin from carrying this forward,” Blinken said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country has Russia troops on three borders, called on Western leaders to slap sanctions on Moscow before an invasion is launched not after.
“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen, and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied. Why would we need those sanctions then?” he said Saturday at the Munich Security Conference.
Blinken said the US and its European allies have put together a “massive” package of sanctions against Russia.
“The purpose of the sanctions in the first instance is to try to deter Russia from going to war. As soon as you trigger them, that deterrent is gone and until the last minute, as long as we can try to bring a deterrent effect to this, we’re going to try and do that,” he said.
Blinken also said the West doesn’t want to play its sanctions hand early to prevent Russia from preparing for them.
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