Once again, the United States and some of its security clients in Eastern Europe are doing their utmost to create a crisis atmosphere with respect to Russia. A key player in that effort is the government of Ukraine. As Ukrainian officials did in April 2021, they are again highlighting allegedly suspicious Russian troop movements near the border between the two countries in late October and early November. Ukrainian leaders contend that such maneuvers might well be the prelude to a military offensive.

Written exclusively for the NCW website by Ukraine expert Dmitriy Kovalevich, this month he investigates the rumours and the reasons behind them that are currently circulating in the Ukraine’s and in some western media of an imminent threat of invasion by Russia.

The charade has come to a point that – diplomatically – is quite unprecedented: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lost his Taoist patience.

This past April, it appeared as if Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing for a full-fledged invasion of Ukrainian territory. As many as 110,000 Russian troops, alongside additional military trucks, tanks and other armored vehicles, were being positioned close to Ukraine’s border in what the U.S. and Europe described as a highly publicized attempt at Russian coercion. Fortunately, a military incursion never occurred.

On Tuesday, 23 November, Russia’s most senior military general, Valery Gerasimov, had a “deconfliction” phone conference with US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, in which the two discussed “pressing issues of international security.”

In recent statements, Moscow seems much more realistic about the consequences of actual conflict with Kiev and Western powers.

The White House is said to be considering the deployment of military advisers and new weaponry to Ukraine in a move that would probably cross President Putin’s “red lines”.

A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords.

In the early hours of a sunny July morning in 2020, Belarussian special forces stormed a spa hotel outside Minsk. The 33 Russian nationals who emerged, hunched over with their hands in handcuffs, were accused by Belarussian authorities of belonging to Russia’s secretive private military group Wagner, and promptly deported. Now, a report by investigative journalism site Bellingcat says that the Russians were lured to Minsk as part of a sting operation orchestrated by Ukrainian military intelligence.

The Kremlin’s sharpened rhetoric is accompanied by what some experts believe to be the early signs of Russia’s growing preparedness to escalate the military conflict in eastern Ukraine.