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Russo-Ukraine War - 18 February 2022

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US intelligence gave President Biden the confidence to say on 18 February he was "convinced" that Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade. The Washington Post noted: "US intelligence that provided Biden with the confidence to make the assertion came from an order given to Russian subordinates to proceed with a full-scale attack, according to several people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity." CNN said other signs that might indicate an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine "have not yet been observed" citing an anonymous source. The source also warned that orders to attack could still be withdrawn, or that the intelligence might have been planted to mislead the West.

US officials said 18 February 2022 reports of explosions and evacuations in Donbas are a smokescreen under which Russia is concentrating its forces to launch aggression against Ukraine. The US State Department called the evacuation of residents in the Donbass a pretext for launching a Russian military operation against Ukraine. American representatives believe that Russia is the true aggressor in this conflict, and reports of evacuations and explosions are just an attempt by the Russians to hide this fact under a veil of lies and disinformation.

"It was this type of false flag operation that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned about in his speech to the UN Security Council," an unnamed State Department spokesman said. "This is a cynical and cruel attempt to use people as pawns to distract the world from the fact that Russia is building up its forces to prepare for an attack," the US official said.

America’s willful ignorance of atrocities being committed against Russian-speaking people in Ukraine is causing “outrage and indignation” in Moscow and is an example of Washington’s “double standards,” Russia’s ambassador to the US claimed. Anatoly Antonov’s statement came in response to a comment made by US State Department spokesman Ned Price, who accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of spreading allegations with “no basis of truth.”

Antonov listed the shelling of residential areas and the 2014 Trade Unions House fire in Odessa as examples of Kiev targeting Russian speakers. He also claimed that mass graves with almost 300 people had been found in the Donbass, and asserted that they had been killed because of their native language between August and October 2021, in the village of Slavyanoserbsk, in the area of the residential area Sokogorovka Pervomaisk, the village of Vidnoye-1 near Lugansk and on the outskirts of the village of Verkhneshevyrevka, Krasnodonsky district, five mass graves were discovered, according to the Investigative Committee of Russia. The remains of at least 295 civilians, including women, who were killed by indiscriminate shelling by Ukrainian armed forces in 2014, were exhumed. The attacks on the peaceful civilians of Donbass by the Kiev and neo-Nazi militias were called nothing short of genocide by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on 18 February 2022 that Ukraine is conducting a “genocide” against the population of Donbass. “[The situation in Donbass] does not look like a genocide, it is a genocide,” she said. “Maybe not on the scale seen in Africa, but please, are we supposed to go off quantitative parameters when women, children, civilians have been dying for seven years, when people have no semblance of a peaceful life, when the sound of approaching munitions is completely normal for them?”

On 18 February 2022, the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) and Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) announced the evacuation of their citizens to Russia's Rostov Region after the Ukrainian army launched an attack against the republics. The head of the Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin, said the next day that he'd signed a decree on general mobilisation in the republic. About 25,000 residents of the Lugansk People's Republic and 6,600 people, including almost 2,500 children from the Donetsk People's Republic have crossed the border with Russia.