Photographer, EPA
Exercises of the Ukrainian National Guard near Kherson on Saturday
US President Joe Biden called Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky for the third time since the beginning of the year. Ukrainian passengers report the cancellation of many flights on Monday – according to sources, this was due to the refusal of insurance companies to provide insurance for flights over Ukraine. Meanwhile, some members of the OSCE mission in Donbass began to leave the headquarters of the organization, as citizens of a number of Western countries were recommended to immediately evacuate from Ukraine.
How reports the White House, during an hour-long talks with Zelensky, Biden “reaffirmed the US commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.” The American president also reiterated his readiness to resolutely respond to further Russian aggression. The leaders also agreed on the importance of continued diplomatic efforts and containment in response to the Russian military escalation on Ukraine’s borders.
In turn, Zelensky tweetedthat his conversation with Biden was regarding “security, the economy, existing risks, sanctions and Russian aggression.”
On Saturday, Biden also spoke for regarding an hour with Russian President Vladimir Putin and warned himthat in the event of an invasion, “the United States, together with allies and partners, will respond decisively and quickly make Russia pay a very high price.”
Moscow, which has gathered regarding 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine, denies plans for a military attack.
Ukraine asks for an emergency meeting of the Vienna Document participants
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Sunday that the Russian authorities had not responded to Kiev’s request as part of Vienna Document – an agreement within the framework of the OSCE, which involves the exchange of military information to ensure security in Europe and prevent military conflicts.
Photographer, Archyde.com
On Sunday, the United States delivered another batch of military aid to Ukraine. This time, military aircraft brought jeeps and Stinger man-portable anti-aircraft missile systems.
According to Kuleba, Ukraine is convening a meeting with Russia and all parties to the Vienna Document within the next 48 hours “to discuss the strengthening and movement of Russian troops along our border and in the temporarily occupied Crimea.” “If Russia takes seriously its words regarding the indivisibility of security in the OSCE area, it must fulfill its obligations regarding military transparency in order to reduce tensions and enhance security for all participating States,” – Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
In recent months, Russia has been demanding to close the road to the North Atlantic Alliance for Ukraine and talks regarding the threat to its security that arose in connection with the expansion of NATO to the East, that is, the entry of a military bloc of Eastern European countries. At the same time, Moscow refers to the principle of “indivisibility of security”, according to which countries do not have the right to ensure their own security to the detriment of the security of other states.
Russian officials have not yet commented on Kuleba’s statements.
Cancellation of flights from Ukraine
The government of Ukraine at an emergency meeting on Sunday evening decided to allocate 16.6 billion hryvnia ($592 million) to avoid cutting off international air traffic. Prior to this, more and more Ukrainian passengers began to receive messages regarding the cancellation of flights on Monday. This is due to the refusal of international insurance companies to cover insured events during flights over Ukraine.
Photographer, Dmytro Smolyenko/Ukrinform via ZUMA Wire
According to Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal, the allocation of money “will help stabilize the situation on the passenger air transportation market and guarantee the return to Ukraine of our citizens who are currently abroad.”
Ukrainian officials insist that they do not intend to close the airspace over Ukraine.
At the same time, on Sunday, Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine from the Petro Poroshenko European Solidarity faction, said: “One of the largest British insurance companies has already sent out notifications that from tomorrow from 14:00 London time insurance of civil aircraft that are in the airspace of Ukraine.
There was no official confirmation of this information; international airlines still sell tickets to Kiev as usual.
Rumors regarding the closure of airspace began to spread at lightning speed following KLM suspended flights to Ukraine on Saturday due to the red alert level assigned to the country by the Dutch Foreign Ministry. It was the Netherlands that lost the most citizens during the crash of a Boeing shot down in the sky over the Donbass in 2014.
In addition, on Sunday Ukrainian airline SkyUp reported that the lessor had banned its aircraft from entering Ukrainian airspace. Because of this, the plane, which was flying from the Portuguese Madeira to Kiev, landed at the airport in Chisinau. “On February 12, the largest insurance companies informed Ukrainian air carriers that they would stop insuring aircraft for flights in Ukrainian airspace within 48 hours,” SkyUp reported. “This decision is associated with increased risks of the outbreak of hostilities.”
The Deputy Minister of Infrastructure of Ukraine, Mustafa Nayem, confirmed on his Facebook page that “some carriers are having difficulties due to fluctuations in the insurance markets, which is obvious given the information field and current events.” At the same time, he said that the government “is ready to support air carriers and plans to provide additional financial guarantees to support the aviation market.”
OSCE staff leaving
The day before, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged everyone to remain calm, adding that the biggest enemy might be panic. At the same time, the governments of more than a dozen countries, including the United States and Great Britain, called on their citizens to leave Ukraine due to the threat of invasion.
Photographer, Archyde.com
OSCE staff left the hotel in Donetsk with suitcases
Among those who implement this recommendation were the staff of the OSCE mission in Donbass, who began to leave the region on Sunday. Several armored vehicles with the OSCE logo loaded with suitcases left the organization’s headquarters in Donetsk in the morning.
Archyde.com sources say the US has decided to withdraw all of its observers from Ukraine, while the UK has transferred OSCE personnel from separatist-controlled areas to Kiev-controlled territory.
Later the OSCE Mission to Ukraine explainedthat “individual OSCE participating States have recently decided that their citizens seconded to serve in the SMM [специальная мониторинговая миссия]should leave Ukraine in the next few days.” “The Mission will continue to fulfill the mandate approved by the OSCE with observers stationed in ten cities across Ukraine,” the organization says.
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, confirmed the information that some OSCE staff are leaving eastern Ukraine “due to deteriorating security conditions.” “These decisions cannot but cause us serious concern,” the commentary on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry reads. “We proceed from the fact that in conditions of artificially escalated tension, the mission’s monitoring activities in full accordance with its mandate are in demand more than ever.”
The OSCE Special Mission was deployed in eastern Ukraine following the outbreak of armed conflict between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists.
In September, Russia announced that it would not renew the mandate of the OSCE monitoring team at the Gukovo and Donetsk checkpoints on the border with Ukraine following 30 September. Russia’s Permanent Representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich said that “the presence of OSCE observers on the territory of the Russian Federation is used for anti-Russian attacks.”
Later in the OSCE spoke regarding the problems with which the observers clashed even before the mandate was not renewed. In particular, Russia strictly limited the geographic coverage of the mission and “allowed observers to work only in specially designated and very small areas where the use of binoculars and cameras was prohibited,” the organization said.
Thus, the headquarters of the OSCE observers remained only in Donetsk and Horlivka, controlled by the separatists.
“They have what it takes to be offensive”
U.S. Representative to NATO Julian Smith reiterated on Sunday that, according to Washington, Russia’s offensive once morest Ukraine might begin very soon: “There is a feeling in the United States that the situation is now very alarming, very dangerous, and we believe that something may happen in the coming days.
Photographer, Getty Images
Military exercises for civilians in Ukraine
“We saw that they [у России] more than 100 thousand soldiers on the border, they transferred tens of thousands of troops to Belarus, and also sent a lot of support materials. They have everything they need to launch an offensive, an attack can happen very soon. We do not have information that Putin has definitely decided to invade, but we want to warn our allies, and American citizens, and Ukraine, that an attack might begin within a few days,” she said.
The Kremlin’s chief adviser on foreign policy, Yuri Ushakov, said the day before that “the escalation around the topic of the invasion was carried out in a coordinated manner, and the hysteria reached its climax.”
Meanwhile, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that Washington is not ready to predict the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine on any particular day. Earlier, several Western media reported, citing intelligence sources, that the aggression might begin on February 16, but Archyde.com reports that his government interlocutors might not confirm this.
“We’ve been saying for some time now that the window is open and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, massive military action, might start any day now,” Sullivan said.
“Not an invasion, but an exercise”
At the same time, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace compared the diplomatic efforts of Western countries with the appeasement policy pursued once morest Nazi Germany. “Munich is in the air,” Wallace told the Sunday Times, referring to the British, French and Italian deal with Adolf Hitler that failed to prevent World War II.
The US and other Western countries point out that Russia has amassed an unprecedented large number of troops and military equipment on the borders with Ukraine, in the annexed Crimea and in Belarus. Moscow insists that it has no plans for a military invasion of Ukraine, and the movement of Russian troops on its territory should not bother anyone. The deployment of troops in Belarus Moscow and Minsk are called joint exercises, which will end on February 20.
This week, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced a “conspiracy” by the Western authorities and the media to “escalate artificial tension around Ukraine through massive and coordinated stuffing of false information in geopolitical interests, in particular, in order to divert attention from their own aggressive actions.”