The United States is monitoring Russian military activity near Ukraine and the information raises “a lot of concern,” the top US military official said late on Thursday (2).
Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the General Staff, said Russian rhetoric seemed increasingly shrill, the official said.
The official declined to speculate on the types of options the United States might consider in the event of a Russian invasion. But Milley, in some of his most extensive comments on the crisis, emphasized the importance of Ukraine’s sovereignty to Washington and the NATO alliance.
“The important national security interests of the United States and NATO member states would be at stake if there were an aggressive act of military action by the Russians in a nation-state that has been independent since 1991,” Milley said during a flight from Seoul to Washington.
Ukraine says Russia has assembled more than 90,000 troops near its long shared border. But Moscow has rejected suggestions that it is preparing for an attack on its southern neighbor and has defended its right to send troops into its own territory as it sees fit.
The Kremlin already annexed the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine’s Black Sea in 2014 and later supported rebels fighting Kiev government forces in the east of the country. That conflict killed 14,000 people, says Kiev, and is still boiling over.
Experts warn that a Russian invasion could be destabilizing, creating ripple effects far beyond Ukraine, at a time of growing anxiety over Chinese intentions toward Taiwan.
Milley has refused to publicly state his estimate of the number of Russian forces near Ukraine, but has suggested that his concerns go beyond the raw number of Russian soldiers.
“I’m not going to say what we track and intelligence indicators or warnings, but we track everything,” Milley said. “And now there is enough to cause a lot of concern, and we will continue to monitor.”
Russia and Ukraine have centuries of shared history and formed the two largest republics in the Soviet Union until the collapse of 1991. Moscow sees its neighbor’s ambition to join NATO as an affront and a threat.
Since the beginning of the last crisis, Moscow demands the guarantee from the countries of the West that NATO does not admit Ukraine as a member and that there will not be the implantation of missile systems in the country that could reach Russia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Moscow on Thursday of “serious costs” that the country would face if it invaded Ukraine, encouraging his Russian counterpart to seek a diplomatic way out of the crisis.
Milley refused to speculate whether Russian President Vladimir Putin could be encouraged by the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, saying: “You would have to ask Putin.” The August withdrawal ended America’s two-decade war in unequivocal defeat, with the Taliban regaining power.
“I think it would be a mistake for any country to draw a broad strategic conclusion based on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and then take that event and automatically apply it to other situations,” Milley said.
He cited historical examples of former US presidents withdrawing troops in some places but ordering military action elsewhere.
“So the United States is a difficult country for other countries to understand at times,” he said.
Reference: CNN Brasil
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