Summary
Here’s a roundup of the key developments from the day:
- Boris Johnson has said the situation in Ukraine is “very, very dangerous” and urged Vladimir Putin to step back from “the edge of a precipice”. The prime minister said the evidence was “pretty clear” that Russia was planning an invasion.
- Russia’s ambassador to the EU has said Moscow would be within its rights to launch a “counterattack” if it felt it needed to protect Russian citizens living in eastern Ukraine. The comments in an interview with the Guardian will do little to calm fears of a major Russian assault on Ukraine, given one of the key scenarios suggested by western intelligence was Russia launching a “false-flag” operation to provide a pretext for invasion.
- A Russian attack on Ukraine could arrive with “no notice”, the armed forces minister has warned. Bombs could hit Ukraine within minutes of Vladimir Putin giving the order, James Heappey said during an interview on Sky News.
- Boris Johnson will travel to Europe later this week as part of intensive diplomatic efforts to bring the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “back from the brink” of war in Ukraine. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, and foreign secretary, Liz Truss, are also due to take part in meetings with international counterparts to discuss the crisis, although there were acknowledgements in Whitehall the diplomacy may prove futile if the Kremlin is set on war.
- The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy gave a joint press conference following their talks in Kyiv earlier today. They stressed the seriousness of the situation as diplomatic talks continue to avoid a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Boris Johnson cut short his UK tour on Monday to return to London as western leaders voiced concerns a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen imminently, and Liz Truss convened a Cobra meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
- Vladimir Putin could launch an invasion of Ukraine “almost immediately”, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has warned after chairing a meeting of the government’s Cobra emergency committee. Truss repeated a call for Britons to leave Ukraine because of the threat of war.
- Families bereaved by Covid want Boris Johnson to relinquish control over which issues will be investigated in the pandemic public inquiry, alleging he is compromised by allegations of lockdown-breaking at Downing Street. The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group fears the current arrangement, where Johnson has a final say over inquiry topics, could allow him to water down examination of his own conduct and that of senior officials.
- UK ministers and the Scottish government have reached a deal over proposed freeports in Scotland, after months of disagreement over what No 10 has billed as one of the main economic benefits of Brexit. The Scottish government had resisted the idea of freeports – specific areas that offer tax breaks and other incentives to investors – which are intended to revitalise deprived areas but have been accused of encouraging tax avoidance and lower regulation.
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Keir Starmer has confirmed he received death threats following Boris Johnson’s false claim that he failed to prosecute the paedophile Jimmy Savile. The Labour leader said the prime minister’s slur had “fed into” a “rightwing conspiracy theory”, and this had caused “difficulty”.
Thanks so much for joining me today and for all your tweets, emails and comments below the line. Sorry I couldn’t reply to everyone. We’re closing this blog but I’ll be back again tomorrow and we have some other liveblogs which are still live.
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Russia’s ambassador to the EU has said Moscow would be within its rights to launch a “counterattack” if it felt it needed to protect Russian citizens living in eastern Ukraine.
The comments in an interview with the Guardian will do little to calm fears of a major Russian assault on Ukraine, given one of the key scenarios suggested by western intelligence was Russia launching a “false-flag” operation to provide a pretext for invasion.
Vladimir Chizhov, who has represented Russia in Brussels since 2005, said:
We will not invade Ukraine unless we are provoked to do that. If the Ukrainians launch an attack against Russia, you shouldn’t be surprised if we counterattack. Or, if they start blatantly killing Russian citizens anywhere – Donbas or wherever.
Donbas is the region of eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin has armed and funded an insurgency since 2014. It has also, in recent years, handed out hundreds of thousands of Russian passports to residents of two so-called “people’s republics”, which are no longer controlled by Kyiv.
More than 14,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 2014.
Russia has always denied being a party to the conflict despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Chizhov described claims Russian troops were already in the Donbas region as a “lie” but warned that a sudden escalation of the conflict there, or a Ukrainian “provocation”, could precipitate action by the Kremlin.
What I mean by provocation is that they may stage an incident against the self-proclaimed Donbas republics, provoking them, and then hitting them with all their might, thus provoking Russia to react in order to avoid humanitarian catastrophe on its borders.
The US government has claimed to have evidence that Moscow is planning just the kind of provocation Chizhov said Kyiv could launch. US officials went public last month with claims they had evidence of a plan to make a “very graphic” fake video of a Ukrainian attack.
With an estimated 145,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, intelligence officials in the US said over the weekend that Russia had accelerated plans for an invasion and could move troops across the border as soon as Wednesday.
Read more from my colleagues Daniel Boffey in Brussels and Shaun Walker in Kyiv here:
