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President Joe Biden is prepared to engage with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in any format at any place and time to prevent a war, top United States diplomat said on Sunday as he asserted that everything leading up to the actual invasion of Ukraine appears to be taking place.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's comments came amid heightened tensions between Russia and the US, fuelled by fears that Moscow plans to invade Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly denied that it has plans to attack Ukraine.
"As we have described it, everything leading up to the actual invasion appears to be taking place, all of these false flag operations, all of these provocations to create justifications. All of that is already in train," Blinken told CNN in an interview.
"We believe President Putin has made the decision, but until the tanks are actually rolling and the planes are flying, we will use every opportunity and every minute we have to see if diplomacy can still dissuade President Putin from carrying this forward," he said.
"President Biden is prepared to engage President Putin at any time, in any format, if that can help prevent a war. I reached out to my Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister (Sergey) Lavrov, to urge that we meet next week in Europe. The plan is still to do that, unless Russia invades in the meantime," Blinken said in response to a question.
President Biden said on Friday that based on the latest American intelligence, he was 'convinced' that Putin has decided to invade Ukraine in coming days.
The top American diplomat alleged that Russia is trying to create a series of provocations as justifications for aggression against Ukraine going forward.
"We have seen that over the last few days. Now they're justifying the continuation of exercises, and exercises in quotation marks, that they said would end now, the continuation indefinitely of those 'exercises', on the situation in Eastern Ukraine, a situation that they have created by continuing to ramp up tensions," Blinken said.
Meanwhile, they have been escalating the forces they have across Ukraine's borders over the last months from 50,000 forces to 100,000 to now more than 150,000, he said.
"So, all of this, along with the false flag operations we have seen unfold over the weekend, tells us that the playbook that we laid out is moving forward," he said.
Blinken said that the US, with its European partners and allies, have prepared a massive package of sanctions against Russia in case of an invasion of Ukraine.
"The G7 countries in Munich came together, reiterated that there would be massive consequences for Russia if it pursues this aggression," he said.
"The purpose of the sanctions in the first instance is to try to deter Russia from going to war. As soon as you trigger them, that deterrent is gone. And until the last minute, as long as we can try to bring a deterrent effect to this, we're going to try to do that," he said.
Meanwhile, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday categorically ruled out deployment of American troops in Ukraine and warned Moscow of punitive sanctions if its troops crossed over the border.
"President Biden has been very clear about the fact that we're not going to employ forces in Ukraine. And we will make sure that we do everything possible to protect our troops and our Polish partners so that there isn't a spillover cross-boundary," Austin told ABC News in a separate interview.
"This is something that we'll be on lookout for and we'll be thoughtful about making sure that we've taken the right steps to try to prevent that," he said.
Responding to questions, Austin said that the Russian President has been very deliberate in terms of assembling the right kind of combat and combat support capabilities, in the border region, and so he has a number of options available to him there.
"And he could attack in short order... I think he's assembled the right kind - the kinds of things that you would need to conduct a successful invasion," he added.
Referring to the nature of deployment of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, he said there is a significant amount of combat power moving very quickly now to take Kyiv.
"We see a lot of tanks and armoured vehicles there. We see a lot of artillery. We see rocket forces. If he employs that kind of combat power, it will certainly create enormous casualties within the civilian population and so this could create a -- tragedy, quite frankly, in terms of refugee flow and displaced people. So this is potentially a very, very dangerous (situation)," he added.
Austin also warned that Russia will face tough sanctions from the US and the international community.
"The sanctions that we talked about, we're very serious about, and these are sanctions that will have effects that Mr. Putin has not realised before. You know, the sad part about this, is that it may not affect Mr. Putin to the degree that it's going to affect the average Russian. And, you know, the decisions that he's making now will bring about a lot of pain and suffering on his comrades in Russia," he said.