Washington said on Friday that an invasion could come at any time, perhaps before the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The announcement came after new satellite images published by a private U.S. company, Maxar Technologies, disclosed new Russian military deployments. Russia is holding joint military exercises in ex-Soviet Belarus as well as naval drills in the Black Sea.
Answers sent by the EU and NATO this week to Russia’s security demands showed "disrespect" claimed Moscow.
President Joe Biden has warned that he would not send troops to rescue U.S. citizens in the event of a Russian assault, during an interview with NBC.
Biden was due to hold a phone call on Friday to discuss the crisis with the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland and Romania, as well as heads of NATO and the EU reported Reuters.
Biden met his national security advisers in the White House Situation Room overnight, a source familiar with the meeting said. U.S. officials believed the crisis could be reaching a critical point, with rhetoric from Moscow hardening, six Russian warships reaching the Black Sea and more Russian military equipment arriving in Belarus, the source said.
Japan and the Netherlands has also told their citizens on Friday to leave Ukraine immediately. The Dutch diplomatic mission decided to relocate from Kyiv and move far from the Russian frontier to Lviv in Ukraine's west.
Moscow denies planning to invade Ukraine, but says it could take unspecified "military-technical" action unless a series of demands are met, including promises from NATO never to admit Ukraine and to withdraw forces from Eastern Europe.
Diplomatic efforts
The EU and NATO alliance delivered responses this week on behalf of their member states, which they said had agreed to speak as one.
Russia's Foreign Ministry reiterated on Friday that it wanted individual answers from each country and called the collective response insulting.
Several Western countries launched diplomatic pushes this week to persuade Russia to back down, but Moscow brushed them off, yielding no concessions to French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited on Monday, and openly mocking British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss when she came on Thursday.
British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace also travelled to Moscow. Wallace said Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had repeated Russia's assurances that it was not planning to invade.
Four-way talks in Berlin between Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France, part of a longstanding peace process in a conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists, also yielded no progress on Thursday.
Paris and Kyiv said the Russian delegation had demanded Ukraine negotiate directly with the separatists, a "red line" Ukraine has rejected since the conflict began in 2014.
-Reuters