Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Sunday the US national security council would meet to review the latest intelligence on Ukraine and “check plans”.
Related: Russian troops will remain indefinitely, says Belarus, as fears rise of Ukraine invasion
Blinken toured the TV political shows to press home the Biden administration’s message that the US remains convinced that Russia is poised to invade Ukraine.
“As President Biden said, everything we are seeing tells us that the decision we believe President Putin has made to invade is moving forward,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.
Pressed to give details of why the US continues to believe an invasion is imminent despite repeated Russian denials, Blinken pointed to what he called “provocations” by separatist forces and “false flag operations” that could be used by Putin to justify overrunning its neighbour.
“Now we have the news just this morning that the ‘exercises’ Russia was engaged with in Belarus, with 30,000 forces, which were supposed to end this weekend will now continue because of tensions in eastern Ukraine – tensions created by Russia.”
Blinken had just returned from Munich, where he accompanied Kamala Harris to a security conference. He is scheduled to meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in Europe next week, but has stipulated that the encounter will be cancelled if an invasion occurs.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was sharply critical of allied leaders for waiting to impose sanctions until after any bombardment had begun. He accused world leaders of “appeasement”.
Asked by CBS to respond to the criticism, Blinken said: “We have put together in great detail the massive consequences that will befall Russia if it engages in this aggression.
“The purpose of that is to deter the aggression, and once you trigger the sanctions you lose the deterrence.”
