Western leaders should see doctor over Ukraine ‘paranoia’, says Russian envoy

“I think they need to have a good doctor; I recommend them to do it, specialist on such paranoia cases,” said Russia’s Deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy in a press briefing at UN headquarters in New York, rejecting the notion that his country planned to invade Ukraine.

“Our troops are on our territory, (they) represent (a) threat to no one,” he further reiterated when asked about the size of Russian troops along its long border with Ukraine as part of a military drill with its ally Belarus. “I don’t know about the numbers, because there are a lot of speculations about it.”

“I think the training with Belarus would be over in one week’s time. For the rest, I don’t know,” Polyanskiy then emphasized.

The Kremlin has condemned weeks-long US claims about a looming Russian invasion of Ukraine as “baseless hysteria”.

Moscow announced a partial pullback of forces from near Ukraine on Tuesday. 

Russia’s defense ministry on Wednesday published video showing a column of tanks and military vehicles leaving Crimea across a railway bridge after drills, adding that some troops will also return to their permanent bases. 

“Combat equipment and military personnel will be delivered by military trains to the units’ permanent deployment points,” the defense ministry said.

“Upon arrival, the equipment will be serviced and prepared for carrying out the next phase of combat training.”

West ‘destroyed without a single shot being fired:’ Russia

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Western governments have been “destroyed without a single shot being fired.”

“February 15, 2022 will go into history as the day Western war propaganda failed. They have been disgraced and destroyed without a single shot being fired,” she wrote in a Telegram post.

The Russian ruble gained against the dollar and euro in response to the news from the Russian military, press reports noted.

MPs ask Putin to recognize breakaway regions

Russia’s lower house of parliament, meanwhile, voted on Tuesday to ask President Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of two pro-Russian regions in eastern Ukraine, as the European Union expressed its opposition to the move.

“Kyiv is not observing the Minsk agreements. Our citizens and compatriots who live in Donbass need our help and support,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the State Duma speaker, wrote on social media.

Volodin, a member of the ruling United Russia party, said the appeal would be sent to the Kremlin immediately.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters, “If the decision on recognition is taken, Russia will de facto and de jure withdraw from the Minsk agreements with all the attendant consequences.”

At a news conference in Moscow, Putin said Russians were sympathetic to the residents of the Donbass region, but he wanted the regions’ problems to be resolved through the Minsk accords.

Using stark language that Germany’s visiting Chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissed as “wrong,” the Kremlin leader said Russia considered the treatment of ethnic Russians in the Donbass region as “genocide.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said if Moscow recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, it would institute an “attack without weapons.”

“If this were applied then it would be an impossible situation and would be a sort of attack without weapons. It would be in violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Le Drian declared in a parliamentary hearing. 

US President Joe Biden further also insisted that a renewed invasion of Ukraine was “still very much a possibility”. 

Former US Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein blasted the Biden administration in a Twitter post, pointing to Washington’s long history of lying to American people.

“They lied to you about Vietnam. They lied to you about Iraq & Afghanistan. They lied to you about Syria & Libya. They lied to you about Honduras & Bolivia. They lied to you about Assange & Russiagate. So why the hell would you believe what they’re telling you about Ukraine?” she wrote.

Ukraine hit by cyber attack  

The Ukrainian government appeared to blame Moscow for a cyber attack after Russia’s announcement of a partial pullback.

Hours after Moscow’s announcement, Ukraine claimed that the online networks of its Defense Ministry and two banks had been overwhelmed in what is called a distributed denial-of-service. The maneuver works when hackers flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic to paralyze it.

Although Kiev did not name who was behind the incident, an official statement hinted that it was pointing the finger at Russia.

“It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of dirty little tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale,” said the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security.