Russian President Vladimir Putin is “as ready as he can be” for an invasion of Ukraine, with “nearly 100%” of the necessary military forces already in position, a senior US official said on Wednesday.
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Mr. Putin “has almost 100% of all the forces that we had calculated that he would put in place” to invade Ukraine, said a defense official on condition of anonymity.
According to this source, 80% of the more than 150,000 Russian soldiers present on the Ukrainian borders are “in battle order”, gathered in attack formation a few kilometers from the border.
The Russian president “is as ready as he can be”, continued this official, adding that the decision “to really go there or not rests with Mr. Putin”. “They can go there at any time,” he stressed.
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said the invasion had already “begun”, but the United States said it did not yet have independent evidence of Russian troop movements within Ukrainian territory.
“We still cannot confirm that the Russian army has moved into the Donbass,” the official explained on Wednesday.
However, “we have every reason to believe that they have penetrated” into the pro-Russian separatist territories of Donetsk and Lugansk, he added.
The US military generally uses surveillance aircraft to observe their adversaries’ military operations, and the weather can sometimes interfere with their visibility.
Listen to the analysis of Dominique Arel, holder of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the School of Political Studies of the University of Ottawa