Escalating tension between Russia and Ukraine puts the US on alert. Washington warns Putin that “there will be consequences” if Moscow “attacks” its neighboring country.

The around 20,000 soldiers that Russia has deployed just 100 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, the largest detachment since 2014, is causing an escalation of tension between the two countries in which the United States again came out on Sunday to warn Vladimir Putin that there will be “costs and consequences” if he attacks the neighboring country.

And it is that in recent months the fighting between the Ukrainian troops and the Russian separatists – supported politically and militarily by the Kremlin – has increased in the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine.

Dmitri Peskov , spokesman for the Russian president, assured that “no one” intends to go to war with Ukraine, but warned that Russia “will not ignore the fate of Russian-speakers living in the southeast of the country”, alluding to Donbas, where Moscow has distributed since 2019 more than 600,000 passports .

The view of Kiev, which sees Russia as an “aggressor state” after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and its support for the separatist rebels, is very different and made it clear that it “will not give in” to what it considers Putin’s “pressure”.

Restlessness in the White House
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already alerted the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, NATO and the EU to this Russian movement, to which Moscow responds by stressing that “it should not worry anyone”, because “It does not pose a threat to anyone.”

However, in an interview on NBC, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken did show his “concern” about Russia’s military actions on the Ukrainian border.

“President Joe Biden has been very clear about this. If Russia acts recklessly or aggressively, there will be costs, there will be consequences,” Blinken warned in the face of his administration’s first litmus test with Russia.