He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin is following the invasion playbook that the U.S. presented to the United Nations Security Council on Thursday. During the meeting, Blinken presented that Russia would fabricate a crisis to justify aggression and the presence of its troops. “He’s followed the script almost to the letter,” Blinken said.
“As we described it, everything leading up to the actual invasion appears to be taking place: all these false flag operations, all of these provocations to create justifications,” he said.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on ABC’s “This Week” that the situation along Ukraine’s borders clearly pointed to the threat of an invasion by Putin’s forces.
“We see a lot of tanks and armored vehicles there,” Austin told Martha Raddatz. “We see a lot of artillery. We see rocket forces. If he employs that kind of combat power, it will certainly create enormous casualties within the civilian population and so this could create a tragedy, quite frankly, in terms of refugee flow and displaced people. So this is potentially very, very dangerous.”
Despite the looming threat of an invasion, Blinken said the U.S. will be open to the option of diplomacy “until the tanks are actually moving and the planes are actually flying.” Blinken is scheduled to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, although he emphasized that the meeting would not occur if Russia invades Ukraine.
“I will do everything I can to see if we can advance a diplomatic resolution to this crisis created by Russia and its aggression against Ukraine,” he said. “We’ve put on the table a number of ideas that we can pursue that would strengthen security for Russia, for the United States, for Europe, if we engage them on a reciprocal basis.”