President Joe Biden said Friday that the United States will send troops to NATO countries in Eastern Europe in the near term, after Russia's deployment of over 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border raised fears of an invasion.
President Joe Biden spoke about Russia and Ukrain in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
The US put 8,500 troops on heightened alert for possible deployment to Eastern Europe earlier this week, but Biden told reporters Friday evening that he will not send a lot of troops to the region in the near term.
The United States sent hundreds of missiles and other military supplies to Ukraine this week, despite the fact that it is not a NATO member.
The Pentagon said that Russia had enough troops and equipment to invade the whole of Ukraine, but military officials said it was not certain if Putin would do so.
Russia did not want to invade Ukraine.
In the year of 2014, Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of the same name, which has a population of over 2 million ethnic Russians. Russian troops and military hardware have been deployed to support the rebels in eastern Ukraine, though the Kremlin denies participating in the conflict. The White House warned Russia last week that it could launch an attack at any time. During a visit to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in January, the Secretary of State accused Russia of using everything from election interference to cyberattacks to divide the country.
There is a chance that Russia will take military action against Ukraine in February, according to the White House. U.S. and European officials have argued that invasion isn't inevitable and have called for an open meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the crisis.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that it would take a long time to see something of this magnitude.
The debate rages over Russia's true motivation. Russia wanted NATO to rule out membership for Ukraine and other post-Soviet states and roll back the presence of troops in Eastern Europe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has been unable to stop NATO from expanding into Eastern Europe, so it has chosen military force as a plan B, according to the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. Critics theorize that elected strongmen like Putin rely on manufactured crises to justify their own expansive powers.
Donald Trump said in a Monday statement that he would not have allowed the crisis to develop if he had been president.
Biden says he will send troops to Eastern Europe in the near term.
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