Russians scoff at Western fears of Ukraine invasion

MOSCOW — While the U.S. warns that Russia could invade Ukraine any day, the drumbeat of war is all but unheard in Moscow, where pundits and ordinary people alike don’t expect President Vladimir Putin to launch an attack on its ex-Soviet neighbor. Speaking to reporters after President Joe Biden’s call with Putin on Saturday, Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov bemoaned what he described as U.S. “hysteria” about an allegedly imminent invasion, saying that the situation has “reached the point of absurdity.” The U.S. says that Russia has concentrated over 130,000 troops east, north and south of Ukraine and has the necessary firepower to launch an attack at any moment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dimissed the invasion warnings as “madness” and taunted the move by the U.S. and some of its allies to withdraw most of their diplomatic staff from Ukraine as “demonstrative hysteria.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has taken a more combative tone, denouncing Washington’s warnings of an imminent Russian attack on Ukraine as “war propaganda” by the U.S. and some of its allies. Zakharova alleged that the U.S. “needs a war at any price,” charging that “provocations, disinformation and threats represent its favorite methods of solving its own problems.” She denounced U.S. intelligence claims about an alleged “false flag” operation mounted by Russia to create a pretext for invading Ukraine, comparing them to then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 speech before the U.N. Security Council, in which he made the case for war against Iraq, citing faulty intelligence information claiming Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. “We are brotherly people, and we have lived together for so many years.” Russian political analysts are broadly dismissive of U.S. war warnings, pointing out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would carry a massive price without offering Putin any clear wins.