The intelligence about a “false flag” operation was discussed in a quickly convened meeting in the White House Situation Room on Thursday evening and helped prompt renewed calls from the Biden administration for all Americans to leave Ukraine immediately, according to officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The precise timing and nature of the Russian operation was unclear. The United States had already accused Russia of planning to film a fake attack against Russian territory or Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine. The new intelligence is distinct from that alleged operation, the officials said.
Officials in multiple capitals concurred that the intelligence appeared to show that Russia is in the final stages of preparing to mount an invasion, which analysts have said could leave up to 50,000 civilians dead or wounded and lead to the fall of the government in Kyiv within a few days.
“Moscow is actively trying to create a casus belli,” or a justification for war, a Western official said.
On Friday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the continuing buildup of Russian forces and other information gleaned from intelligence reporting “makes it clear to us that there is a very distinct possibility that Russia will choose to act militarily. And there is reason to believe that could happen on a reasonably swift time frame.”
Sullivan alluded to the new intelligence. “We are firmly convinced that the Russians, should they decide to move forward with an invasion, are looking hard at the creation of a false-flag operation, something that they generate and try to blame on the Ukrainians as a trigger for military action. And we are calling that out publicly because we do believe that if Russia chooses to do that, they should be held to account.”
Sullivan said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had not made a “final decision” on whether to order an invasion. Other officials concurred with that assessment but added that the new intelligence suggested an invasion was now more a question of when, not if.
U.S. and European intelligence analysts had previously said that Putin might wait until after the conclusion of the Olympics on Feb. 20 to launch an invasion, to not upstage his close ally, Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But that timeline appeared to be changing.
“What we can say is that there is a credible prospect that a Russian military action would take place even before the end of the Olympics,” Sullivan said.
When Biden administration officials last week accused Russia of trying to stage a pretext for war, they said people had been recruited to take part in a fabricated video, which would feature graphic footage of a staged, false explosion, using corpses to stand in for victims.
U.S. and British officials have mounted their own information offensive, declassifying and releasing information about Russian plotting, they say, to deter Putin from carrying out his plans. In addition to the earlier exposure of a possible false-flag operation, last month the British government announced that the Kremlin was scheming to install a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv.
The information “shines a light on the extent of Russian activity designed to subvert Ukraine, and is an insight into Kremlin thinking,” U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement, calling on Russia to de-escalate and pursue a path of diplomacy.
The intelligence underlying the assertion, which also linked some former Ukrainian politicians to Russian intelligence officers involved in planning for an attack on Ukraine, was collected and declassified by the United States, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The Biden administration asked the British government, which vetted the intelligence and was confident in its accuracy, to publicly expose the Russian plotting, the people said.
The Kremlin has also sought to create the grounds for an invasion through a propaganda campaign that falsely portrays Ukraine as preparing to launch an offensive against separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, U.S. and European officials have said.
As part of that effort, Russian authorities have promoted a years-old false narrative of the Ukrainian government seeking to carry out genocide against ethnic Russians in the region. According to the Western official, the Kremlin has tasked Russian state media to report on allegations of Ukrainian “war crimes” in eastern Ukraine even though, the official said, there is no evidence for such claims.
Russian media over the past few months publicized the launch of a website masquerading as a portal set up by human rights advocates in eastern Ukraine. In fact, the official said, it spread false allegations of genocide committed by the Ukrainian military.
The site was covertly created by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the official said.
On Friday, the Tass news agency reported, without evidence, that the head of the self-proclaimed separatist territory of Donetsk had announced the discovery of 130 mass graves of “victims of Ukrainian aggression.”