President Joe Biden said Thursday that there was a “very high” probability that Russia would invade Ukraine, possibly “in the next couple days,” while a top Western security official warned that Moscow has enough troops on its border to attack “with very little or no warning.”
“That is what makes the situation so dangerous,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said during a press conference in Brussels at which he also raised alarms about the Kremlin utilizing disinformation to create a pretext for war with the country, a former Soviet republic.
Even though western officials said they were holding out hope for diplomacy, their increasingly dire rhetoric and actions taken by the Kremlin underscored a sense that a conflict was inevitable and imminent. Russia expelled a high-ranking American diplomat from Moscow on Thursday as Secretary of State Antony Blinken scheduled an emergency trip to address the United Nations Security Council in New York on his way to a planned security conference in Munich.
