Iran Press/America: Russia and NATO have been in dispute over Ukraine. Western countries blame Russia for planning an invasion of Ukraine amid a military buildup near the Ukrainian border. Moscow denies the allegation and insists that the deployments are defensive in nature.
The White House press secretary said Wednesday that the US will no longer describe a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine as "imminent," suggesting the word sent an unintended message when officials used it last week.
"I used that once. I think others have used that once. And then we stopped using it because I think it sent a message that we weren't intending to send, which was that we knew (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin had made a decision," press secretary Jen Psaki said during a briefing Wednesday, according to CNN.
"I would say the vast majority of times I've talked about it, we said he could invade at any time," she went on. "That's true. We still don't know that he's made a decision."
US President Joe Biden has predicted Putin will ultimately decide to launch an invasion, though has acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding the situation and said even Putin's top aides are likely in the dark about the Russian President's intentions.
On Wednesday, Psaki said she'd only used the word "imminent" once, but wouldn't going forward.
"No, I would not say that we are arguing that it's imminent because we're still pursuing a diplomatic solution to give the Russians an off-ramp. Our hope is that this will work and that Putin will understand that war and confrontation is not the path that he wants to follow, but he wants to take a path at diplomacy," she told NPR.
While Putin said during his own news conference Tuesday he was open to continuing talks, Biden, in turn, has deployed 3,000 US troops to Eastern Europe in a bid to reassure NATO allies of the "continued American commitment to their security."
The Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a recent news conference in Moscow that the United States was trying to pull Russia into an armed conflict over the thorny issue of Ukraine. Putin said Washington wants to use a confrontation as a pretext to impose more sanctions on Russia.
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