...a valley girl who woke up one morning and found she was spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State under Obama. A new American success story, under Biden she became spokeswoman for the whole administration, and she was even able to get her sister a job...said the intelligence findings show Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign that frames Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.
Psaki charged that Russia has already dispatched operatives trained in urban warfare who could use explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia's own proxy forces — blaming the acts on Ukraine — if Russian President Vladimir Putin
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
decides he wants to move forward with an invasion.
"We are concerned that the Russian government is preparing for an invasion in Ukraine that may result in widespread human rights
...not to be confused with
individual rights,mind you...
violations and war crimes should diplomacy fail to meet their objectives," Psaki said.
Pentagon front man John Kirby described the intelligence as "very credible." A U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment on the intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity, said much of it was gleaned from intercepted communications and observations of the movements of people.
The U.S. intelligence findings, which were declassified and shared with U.S. allies before being made public, estimate that a military invasion could begin between mid-January and mid-February.
Ukraine is also monitoring the potential use of disinformation by Russia. Separately, Ukrainian media on Friday reported that authorities believed Russian special services were planning a possible false flag incident to provoke additional conflict.
The new U.S. intelligence was unveiled after a series of talks between Russia and the U.S. and its Western allies this week in Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
aimed at heading off the escalating crisis made little progress.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday said the U.S. intelligence community has not made an assessment that the Russians, who have massed some 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border, have definitively decided to take a military course of action.
But Sullivan said Russia is laying the groundwork to invade under false pretenses should Putin decide to go that route. He said the Russians have been planning "sabotage activities and information operations" that accuse Ukraine of prepping for its own imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.
He said this is similar to what the Kremlin did in the lead-up to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that had been under Ukraine's jurisdiction since 1954.
The Crimea crisis came at moment when Ukraine was looking to strengthen ties with the West. Russia had stepped up propaganda that Ukraine's ethnic Russians were being oppressed in eastern Ukraine.