“There’s what Russia says and then there’s what Russia does,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.
The official called the Russian claims that it was pulling back more forces from around Ukraine "false" and gave one of the grimmest assessments yet for the possibility of reaching a diplomatic solution to avoid war.
Moscow has said it was pulling back some of the 150,000 troops that the United States and its allies warn have converged around Ukraine on three sides. But with the world searching for signs that a deadly new conflict on European soil might be averted, days of high-stakes signaling from Russia have been met with skepticism by the West.
Meanwhile, in an apparent bid to back up its claims of a partial withdrawal, the Russian defense ministry released video showing a trainload of armored vehicles moving across a bridge away from Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels that in fact Russia had "increased the number of troops, and more troops are on the way."
NATO sent "concrete proposals" on transparency, risk reduction and arms control and has not received a response from Russia, he said. Meanwhile, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called it "the largest build-up of troops on European soil since the darkest days of the Cold War."
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