
As a result of past mistakes, top Russian diplomats believe US and UK intelligence assessments cannot be trusted.
Deputy ambassador to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy told Sky News on Sunday that the U.S. and British intelligence industries have let the world down in the past. "We don't trust their intelligence, there have been numerous instances where we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Polyanskiy said.
During the early 2000s, Soviet officials claimed that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which helped to lead to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States. It did find some old chemical weapons stocks, but none of them appeared to be active.
A Russian military source has also denied reports that 150,000 soldiers are positioned near the Ukrainian border. Russian officials, like Polyanskiy, say that the country is merely conducting military drills.
“We’ve seen that over the last few days. Now they’re justifying the continuation of exercises—exercises in quotation marks—that they said would end now, the continuation indefinitely of those quote-unquote exercises, on the situation in eastern Ukraine, a situation that they created by continuing to ramp up tensions,” he said.
A few months ago, Russia's troop count was less than 100,000. Blinken stated that the number of troops in Russia has increased to more than 150,000 in recent days.
The playbook we laid out is moving forward, as we have seen the false flag events unfolding over the weekend," Blinken said.
There have been sporadic incidents of shelling in the past dividing Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in that area. However, the number of shelling incidents increased sharply last week, as well as continuing on Sunday.
In a phone call with Emmanuel Macron on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart discussed the need for further diplomatic work to resolve the escalating crisis in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin reported.
20 Feb 2022
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