U.S. Accuses Russia of Fabricating Pretext to Invade Ukraine

Reporter: “The State Department hinted on Thursday that Russia is laying the groundwork for fabricating the pretext of an invasion. Could you confirm that?” “Certainly seen this playbook before, particularly in 2014 with their illegal annexation, occupation of Crimea. Without getting into too much detail, we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion for, you know, a move on Ukraine. In fact, we have information that they’ve pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct what we call a false flag operation, an operation designed to look like an attack on them or their people or Russian speaking people in Ukraine, again, as an excuse to go in, and we already have, in addition, indications that Russian influence actors are already starting. They’re already starting to fabricate Ukrainian provocations that in both state and social media to, again, try to justify in advance some sort of pretext for incursion. I’m not at liberty to go into a whole lot more detail than that, but I hope that by the fact that we can say this as confidently as we can, you, you can take away that, that there’s a fidelity here to the information that we have, that we believe is very credible.”