Moscow slams US statement on attack on Ukraine as disgraceful

In her commentary to the Zvezda television channel that was posted on her Telegram channel on Thursday, Zakharova drew attention to the fact that official Kiev, which has for years been lamenting about being a victim to the Russian "aggression," this time kept on saying it sees not "invasion" and asked its Western patrons to scale back their rhetoric because it was ruining everything in Ukraine: from the economy and investments to public order, TASS reported.

"Maybe, they [in the United States] think it normal to use the situation for the sake of their own revanche - something went wrong back then and not it is necessary to set the countries and their peoples at odds again, to leave people to suffer just to inflate their sense of self-importance. Moreover, they are ready to go that far as to provide their own president - the president of the United States - with such twisted fake data," she said. "They came out one after another - Psaki, Price, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland - to say that they have intelligence data. What kind of intelligence they were speaking about? It’s nothing but utter disgrace. [Information] that invasion is inevitable that it is about to happen, but it turns out that there is no 100% certainty that it is inevitable but they know the date: in 48 hours, in 24 hours, or, maybe on [February] 15, or, maybe, 16, or, maybe at one a.m., or, maybe, at four in the morning."

"Is that what they call intelligence? Who does it? Is it what can be called a great power, which possesses nuclear arms? Is it the leader of the present-day free world? Is it a developed democracy, which is called to illuminate the path for all the rest? <…> Where do they get such data to bake such officials statements for their officials?" she added.

Concerns over Moscow’s alleged preparations for an invasion into Ukraine have been increasingly voiced in the West and in Kiev recently. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov castigated these statements as an empty and groundless escalation of tension, emphasizing that Russia posed no threat to anyone. At the same time, the Kremlin press secretary did not rule out possible provocations to justify such claims and warned that the attempts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict by force would carry extremely serious consequences.