Al Jazeera :
US State Department official Derek Chollet has warned that the US will impose “crippling” sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.
His warning on Sunday came after a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden ended with no breakthrough on the crisis.
The White House insists Moscow faces “swift and severe costs” if it pushes ahead with aggression, while the Kremlin has denounced the US’s “peak hysteria” over Ukraine and has denied it has plans to invade.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the risk of Russian military action in Ukraine was high enough to justify the departure of much of the staff at the US embassy in Kyiv, but said a diplomatic solution to the crisis is still possible.
“The diplomatic path remains open. The way for Moscow to show that it wants to pursue that path is simple. It should de-escalate rather than escalate,” he said.
Hello, and welcome to Al Jazeera’s continuing coverage of the Ukraine-Russia crisis. I am Virginia Pietromarchi with the latest updates.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and US President Joe Biden will speak on Sunday, the spokesman for Ukrainian leader’s said.
Sergii Nykyforov said on Facebook the two leaders “would discuss the security situation and ongoing diplomatic de-escalation efforts”.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby has said that he cannot confirm reports that Russia plans to invade Ukraine on Wednesday.
“I’m not in a position to confirm those reports,” Kirby said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday”, adding that the United States believes that a “major military action could happen any day now.”
Russia carries the “responsibility” for the possibility of war in Ukraine, the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.
There was “the danger of a military conflict, of war in eastern Europe and Russia carries the responsibility for that,” Steinmeier said in a speech to mark his reelection.
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have reached a “critical” point, a German government source said Sunday, the eve of Chancellor Scholz’s departure for Kyiv and then Moscow.
“Our concerns have grown… we asses the situation as very critical, very dangerous”, the source told members of the press, as fears grow that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.
Russia said it was concerned by the decision of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to relocate some of their Ukraine-based monitors.
The OSCE “informed the participating states of the decision by ‘a number of countries’ to relocate their national staff of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine ‘due to deteriorating security conditions'”, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“These decisions cannot but cause our serious concern.”
The OSCE has served as the world’s eyes and ears for the eight-year conflict across Ukraine’s Russian-backed separatist east that has claimed more than 14,000 lives.
Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor and economics minister, has warned that Europe may be on the verge of war.
Speaking in an interview with broadcaster RTL/NTV, Habeck, without elaborating, pointed to large armed forces facing each other.
“We may be on the verge of war in Europe,” he said. “It is absolutely oppressive and threatening.”
Tensions over the Ukraine-Russia crisis have been simmering for more than two months, with diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue showing little sign of progress.
But how did we get to this point?
Here is a timeline of the main events so far.
