Ukraine’s top military official played down the risk of a full-scale Russian invasion and laid part of the blame for heightened tension on international media, insisting that the threat from the Kremlin hasn’t significantly changed in eight years.
Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov pushed back against war-footing rhetoric and called for calm as Russia masses over 100,000 troops, along with tanks and heavy weaponry, on Ukraine’s eastern border. Despite warnings from the U.S. that President Vladimir Putin is readying a potential invasion, no such attack on that scale is imminent, the official said.
“As of today, the Russian army has not formed a strike group that would be able to carry out an invasion,” Reznikov told reporters Tuesday after a meeting with lawmakers behind closed doors in the capital Kyiv. “There are no grounds to think that an invasion will happen tomorrow from a military point of view.”
