ABOVE: CBN News Senior International Correspondent George Thomas appeared on the Thursday edition of CBN’s Faith Nation live from Lviv, Ukraine to give an update on the ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine. Faith Nation is seen weeknights on the CBN News Channel.
The clock is inching closer to midnight as war and rumors of war encircle Ukraine, and now the U.S. and U.K. are blaming Russia for trying to invent a pretext for war by attacking a kindergarten.
The Kremlin insists Russian troops are pulling back, but the evidence proves otherwise. President Biden says the likelihood of an invasion is very high.
“They have not moved any of their troops out – moved more troops in, number one. Number two: We have reason to believe they are engaged in a false flag operation to have an excuse to go in,” Biden said. “Every indication we have is they are prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine.”
Biden is predicting war in the very near future. “My sense it will happen in the next several days,” he said.
NATO allies accuse Russia of misleading the world by saying it was returning some troops to bases. Instead, Russia’s authoritarian ruler Vladimir Putin added as many as 7,000 more forces near the border where roughly 150,000 Russian soldiers are now surrounding Ukraine.
“What we do know is Russia has amassed the biggest force we have seen in decades,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.
“We haven’t seen a pullback,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ABC News. He says Putin “can pull the trigger. He can pull it today. He can pull it tomorrow. He can pull it next week. The forces are there if he wants to renew aggression against Ukraine.”
Satellite images show the Russian military is clearly still ready for attack, and senior U.S. officials are now accusing Russia of straight-up lying. In fact, a senior U.S. administration official said some forces arrived only recently and that there had been a marked increase in false claims by Russians that the Kremlin might use as a pretext for an invasion.
As heads of state and NATO urge Putin to choose diplomacy, a fresh attack on a Ukrainian kindergarten is raising concerns of what will inevitably provoke war.
Russian forces hit a kindergarten in Luhansk region with artillery fire today. There are reports of injuries. Heavy shelling of Ukraine’s government-controlled territory in Donbas by Russian proxy forces reported this morning. So much about de-escalation https://t.co/azogJgLcEu
— Olga Tokariuk (@olgatokariuk) February 17, 2022
Western leaders say Russian operatives shelled the kindergarten and then claimed that the Ukrainian army did it instead. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the attack is a “false flag” operation designed to discredit the Ukrainians and give Russia an excuse to attack.
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