Blinken details Russian military plans at UN Security Council meeting
By Laura Kelly - 02/17/22 12:06 PM EST Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday laid out in stark detail for the United Nations Security Council actions the U.S. believes Russia could take to manufacture a crisis and justify an invasion on Ukraine.
Blinken delivered the last-minute speech as the U.S. warns that Moscow is on the precipice of launching a war.
“Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack,” Blinken said, adding the pretext could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine or “outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian government.”
The secretary said this could take the form of a “fabricated so-called terrorist bombing inside Russia, invented discovery of a mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake, even a real attack using chemical weapons.”
Blinken’s remarks build on the Biden administration’s strategy of sharing assessments of intelligence, without providing specific pieces of evidence, to deter Russia from carrying out the actions and draw attention to what the U.S. says is Russia’s playbook of using campaigns of disinformation to obscure its military action.
more
https://thehill.com/policy/international/594729-blinken-details-russian-military-plans-at-un-security-council-meeting
