Russia will invade in new year, says Ukraine military

Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine at the beginning of next year with far greater force than anything seen in the conflict to date, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.

The Kremlin had sent 92,000 soldiers to its western border and could launch a multi-pronged offensive in January or February, Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of Ukraine’s defence intelligence, told the Military Times.

The assault would include airborne strikes as well as amphibious assaults via the ports of Odessa and Mariupol, Mr Budanov said.

Ukrainian intelligence released a map detailing its assessment of how the invasion would play out, with Russian forces pushing deep into the country from north, east and south. It would be a much more traditional, and bloody, operation than the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Analysts noted that elements of the map are speculative, including Kyiv’s assessment that Russian fighter jets will invade from within Belarus. Moscow’s air force has conducted patrols inside Belarus in the past month, but currently has no permanent military base there.

Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at the US Centre for Naval Analyses, said on Twitter that the map was nonetheless realistic.

“I think this is a sobering and fairly accurate picture of what is being considered,” he wrote on Twitter. “The Russian military can do this. This is a worst case iteration of several possible contingencies.”

Mr Budanov said that Moscow’s priority was to increase internal pressure on the Ukrainian government through disinformation campaigns, but that it would resort to military incursion if these tactics failed to lead to a change of government in Kyiv.

“They want to make the situation inside the country more and more dangerous and hard and make a situation where we have to change the government,” he said. “If they can’t do that, then military troops will do their job.”

Responding to Mr Budanov’s interview, Artyom Lukin, an international relations scholar at the Far Eastern Federal University in Russia, said: “One gets the impression the Ukrainian leadership and the Kremlin are perfectly aligned at least on one thing: ratcheting up tensions and keeping up a sense of crisis.”

Vladimir Putin ‘playing chess’ with the West

The government of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has angered Russia by censoring media channels owned by Kremlin-linked moguls, and moving to oust them from positions of power within the country.

On a trip to Washington last week, Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian defence minister, warned that Vladimir Putin was “playing chess” with the West and was still considering whether to embark on a full-blown invasion.

Western governments have voiced concern about the build-up of Russian troops on the border, while admitting to uncertainty over whether the Russian president is planning an invasion or whether he is engaged in sabre rattling to deter Kyiv from intensifying its military co-operation with Nato.

“We’re not sure exactly what Mr Putin is up to,” Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, admitted on Wednesday.

The UK signed an arms deal with Kyiv this month in which it committed to the sale of 10 naval vessels and new missile systems in order to counter the threat from Moscow.

Boris Johnson has warned that it would be a “tragic, tragic mistake for the Kremlin to think there was anything to be gained by military adventurism” in Ukraine.

Mr Budanov said that the US could deter a Russian invasion by increasing its military support for Kyiv.

“I think it’s not enough for us right now,” he said of existing aid arrangements. “We need more. No countries except Ukraine have open war with Russia. And we have for seven years. That’s why we’re sure the US should give us everything we didn’t get before. And right now, it’s the right time for this because after, it could be very late.”

This spring, a similar Russian military build-up on the border led to fears that Mr Putin was preparing for an invasion of his south-western neighbour, but Moscow eventually pulled back its troops.

Russia says that it is responding to increased Nato exercises near its borders.

Tensions between Russia and Nato members have been increasingly strained in recent weeks, with European governments accusing Moscow of engineering a migrant crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, while Moscow claimed that it scrambled fighter jets to intercept an RAF aircraft headed for its airspace in the Black Sea.