Ukraine's leaders sought to reassure nation that a feared invasion from neighbouring Russia was not imminent, even as they acknowledged threat is real and prepared to accept a shipment of American military equipment Tuesday to shore up their defences.
Russia has denied it is planning an assault, but it has massed an estimated 100,000 troops near Ukraine in recent weeks, leading United States and its NATO allies to rush to prepare for a possible war.
Several rounds of high stakes diplomacy have failed to yield any breakthroughs, and this week tensions escalated further. NATO said it was bolstering its deterrence in Baltic Sea region, and US ordered 8,500 troops on higher alert to potentially deploy to Europe as part of an alliance "response force" if necessary.
The State Department has ordered families of all American personnel at US Embassy in Kyiv to leave country, and it said that nonessential embassy staff could leave.
Britain said it, too, was withdrawing some diplomats and dependents from its embassy. In Ukraine, however, authorities have sought to project calm. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Monday that situation was "under control" and that there is "no reason to panic". Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said that, as of Monday, that Russia's armed forces had not formed what he called battle groups, "which would have indicated that tomorrow they would launch an offensive.""There are risky scenarios. They're possible and probable in future," Reznikov told Ukraine's ICTV channel on Monday. "But as of today...Such a threat doesn't exist."
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, echoed that sentiment, saying that movement of Russian troops near Ukraine's border "is not news."
"As of today, we don't see any grounds for statements about a full-scale offensive on our country," Danilov said Monday.Russia has said Western accusations that it is planning an invasion are merely a cover for NATO's own planned provocations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday once again accused US of "fomenting tensions" around Ukraine, a former Soviet state that Russia has been locked in a bitter tug-of-war with for almost eight years. In 2014, following ouster of a Kremlin-friendly president in Ukraine, Moscow annexed Crimean peninsula and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in country's industrial heartland in east.