Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky does not think a Russian invasion of his country is likely in the near future, and has told US President Joe Biden that American warnings of an attack are destabilizing the economy, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The New York daily wrote on Wednesday that Washington officials have claimed that during a recent telephone call between the two leaders, when Biden warned that the US believed the threat of an invasion had grown, Zelensky replied that there had been a threat since 2014. Biden reportedly answered that the presence of Russian soldiers in Belarus, where they have been dispatched for joint military drills, could increase the chance of aggression.
According to the newspaper’s sources, the Ukrainian president continues to doubt the likelihood of an imminent invasion, and has expressed fears that the stream of American warnings about Russian aggression have actually made an increased buildup of Russian forces more likely, and have helped to destabilize Ukraine politically and economically.
The report also cites senior Ukrainian officials as saying that they were especially upset with Washington’s recent decision to evacuate diplomats’ families and nonessential staff from its embassy in Kiev, because this gave the impression that the city was likely to be captured soon, as Kabul was last summer.