Russia could attack Ukraine at short notice

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday said that Russia could launch a new attack on Ukraine at "very short notice" as he met the country's president on the first leg of a new diplomatic push to avert war. 

Russia said tension around Ukraine was increasing and it was still waiting for a written US response to its sweeping demands for security guarantees from the West.

The pessimistic statements highlighted the gulf between Washington and Moscow as Blinken gears up for a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tomorrow that a Russian foreign policy analyst called "probably the last stop before the train wreck".

Blinken told diplomats at the US embassy in Kyiv that a Russian build-up of tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border was taking place with "no provocation, no reason."

"We know that there are plans in place to increase that force even more on very short notice, and that gives President Putin the capacity, also on very short notice, to take further aggressive action against Ukraine," Blinken said.

Russia has also moved troops to Belarus for what it calls joint military exercises, giving it the option of attacking neighbouring Ukraine from the north, east and south.

But it continues to deny any such intention. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Western weapons deliveries to Ukraine, military manoeuvres and Nato aircraft flights were to blame for rising tension around Ukraine.

Vladimir Frolov, a former Russian diplomat who is now a foreign policy analyst, said Moscow would not be appeased by West's offer of arms control talks and was pursuing a much more sweeping rearrangement of the European security order.

"The Lavrov-Blinken meet is probably the last stop before the train wreck. But hopes are dim, the positions are incompatible," he said.

Describing Russia's military deployment in Belarus as a "huge escalation", Frolov gave a dire assessment of the crisis. "I think barring a US surrender and their delivering Ukraine to Russia, some kind of a military option is all but inevitable now."