Ukraine will not bow to aggression or pressure and will defend itself fiercely, its leaders have vowed, as they agreed with their western allies that Russia did not appear to be withdrawing troops and armour from its neighbour's borders.
"We will not back down or give in," Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy told servicemen on Wednesday as he visited eastern Ukraine for events to mark the country's inaugural "unity day" holiday.
Mr Zelenskiy said eight years of conflict with Russia had strengthened Ukraine’s armed forces and inured its people to panic, after Washington warned that a major new attack could be imminent and could even come on Wednesday.
“We are not afraid of any predictions or any people or any enemies, we are not afraid of any dates, because we will defend ourselves on February 16th and February 17th, and in March and April and September and December,” he said.
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“The year is the important thing – it is 2022, not 2014 . . . This is an important difference. The war has been going on for eight years and we have become that much stronger,” he declared.
“We have strong armed forces of Ukraine, excellent diplomatic, volunteer forces and national resistance forces for the whole of Ukraine, forces to defend our own land and forces that will not succumb to any provocations, forces that can complete the path to a Ukraine that is once more peaceful and united.”
Mr Zelenskiy – who was a popular television comedian before plunging into politics in 2019 – has played down western warnings of an all-out Russian attack on Ukraine, where in 2014 Moscow’s forces annexed Crimea and fomented a war in the eastern Donbas region that has now killed 14,000 people.
Kyiv has focused instead on the chaos that panic could wreak on Ukraine’s fragile economy, and warned that Russia’s multifaceted aggression includes the use of disinformation, economic and cyber attacks to destabilise the country and undermine its people’s faith in their own state.
Cyber attacks briefly downed the websites of Ukraine’s army, defence ministry and at least two major banks on Tuesday evening, in an operation that senior Ukrainian security official Serhii Demediuk blamed on Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted that "Russia has nothing to do with any [such] attacks."
“We do not know anything. As expected, Ukraine continues to blame Russia for everything.”
‘Military-technical’ steps
Russia denies threatening Ukraine but says it will take "military-technical" steps unless the West meets its security demands, which include bans on Ukraine joining Nato and on the positioning of the alliance's military hardware in eastern Europe – steps that the United States and its allies call unacceptable.
The Kremlin also dismissed the sceptical response of the US and Nato to Russia’s announcement that it is sending some troops back to base after drills near Ukraine, where Moscow has massed some 100,000 troops and heavy weapons.
“A certain, probably, handicap is present in Nato’s system for assessing the state of affairs . . . This, for sure, does not allow Nato representatives to soberly assess the situation,” Mr Peskov said.
Mr Zelenskiy told the BBC that “we don’t see any withdrawal yet . . . for now, it’s just statements.”
Western powers say they hope Moscow will make good on a pledge to seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but US president Joe Biden warned that Russia would face an "immense" strategic cost and "overwhelming international condemnation" if it attacked Ukraine again.
“To the citizens of Russia: You are not our enemy,” Mr Biden said in an address on US television.
“And I do not believe you want a bloody, destructive war against Ukraine – a country and a people with whom you share such deep ties of family, history, and culture.”
