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Ukraine Live Updates: U.S. Troops to Be Deployed to NATO Allies in Eastern Europe
Several thousand troops will be sent to NATO member nations in Eastern Europe to reassure allies anxious over tensions surrounding
Ukraine. The U.S. has said it will not deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of conflict there.

RIGHT NOW See how Ukraine is training civilians to resist an attack by Russia.

Here’s what you need to know:

U.S. troops will be deployed to NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

Ukraine’s foreign minister endorses a U.S. plan to ease tensions

Putin accuses the U.S. of trying to goad Russia into starting a conflict in Ukraine.

Key takeaways from a flurry of diplomacy in the Ukraine crisis.

In clashing with the U.S. over Ukraine, Putin has a lifeline from China.

Why Ukraine is important to Putin.

U.S. troops will be deployed to NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

President Biden has approved the deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to Eastern Europe, administration officials
said on Wednesday.

The troops, including 1,000 already in Germany, will head to Poland and Romania, the Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said. Their
purpose will be to reassure NATO allies that while the United States has no intention of sending troops into Ukraine, where President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been threatening an invasion, Mr. Biden would protect America’s NATO allies from any Russian
aggression.

“Its important that we send a strong signal to Mr. Putin and the world that NATO matters,” Mr. Kirby told reporters at a news
conference. “We are making it clear that we are going to be prepared to defend our NATO allies if it comes to that.”

At the moment, Russia is threatening Ukraine, not Romania or Poland. But Mr. Putin has made clear his distaste for both NATO and
the post-Cold War redrawing of the map of Europe, which put former Soviet republics and satellite countries in the West’s foremost
military alliance at his doorstep.

The president’s decision comes days after Pentagon leaders said that Mr. Putin had deployed the necessary troops and military
hardware to conduct an invasion of Ukraine. Senior Defense Department officials also said that the tense standoff was leading the
United States, its NATO allies and Russia into uncharted territory.

The number of Russian troops assembled at Ukraine’s borders has reached well north of 100,000, the officials said, publicly confirming
for the first time what intelligence analysts have described for weeks.

Close to 2,000 of the troops — most of them coming from the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg, N.C. — will be going to Poland, Mr. Kirby
said. While many of those troops are paratroopers, Mr. Kirby said he did not expect the Airborne troops to deploy to Poland in a
“tactical operation,” which would raise the ire of Russia even more.

The troops being moved to Romania will complement French troops being deployed there, Mr. Kirby said.

The administration has not ruled out sending additional troops to Europe, and still has 8,500 American troops on “high alert” for
possible deployment to a NATO rapid response force.

Mr. Kirby also said there would be no change in the status of the small number of American troops in Ukraine. More than 150 U.S.
military advisers are in Ukraine, trainers who have for years worked near Lviv, in the country’s west, far from the front lines. The
current group includes Special Operations forces, mostly Army Green Berets, as well as National Guard trainers from Florida’s 53rd
Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

“It’s a big, unambiguous signal,” said Jim Townsend, a former top Pentagon official for Europe and NATO policy. “It’s also significant
that they are going to the Black Sea. Finally, the Black Sea region is being recognized as a major theater. It’s not just the Baltics.”

James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO, echoed that assessment.
“This is a smart, tight and focused deployment that provides real combat punch by linking up with the very capable U.S. troops
already stationed in Europe,” he said. “But its symbolic value is even higher in reassuring the Baltics and Eastern Europeans that
NATO is tangible and real in its deployable combat power.”

There are currently 4,000 American troops deployed to Poland and 900 in Romania, as well as about 100 U.S. forces in Lithuania, and
60 in Latvia and Estonia on temporary, rotational assignment.

— Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt

Ukraine’s foreign minister endorses a U.S. plan to ease tensions

“Everything is possible, and we should be preparing for every possible scenario,” Dmytro
Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, said on Wednesday. Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau
Scanpix Denmark, via Reuters

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s foreign minister said Wednesday his government does not object to Washington’s proposal to help defuse
the Ukraine crisis by promising not to deploy American missiles or troops in Ukraine

The U.S. proposal is intended to assuage what Moscow has said is a key security concern for Russia.

The Biden administration included it in a letter from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow to Russia’s foreign ministry last week. The
proposal was obtained and published on Wednesday by El País, the Spanish daily, and confirmed to The New York Times as accurate
by a senior European official.

The proposal addresses a concern President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has raised repeatedly in recent months as his military massed
troops near Ukraine’s borders: that if Ukraine joins NATO, short-range missiles could be deployed that could reach Moscow in mere
minutes.

The American offer, however, was not a clear-cut concession to Russia. It was part of a proposal for reciprocal commitments by both
Russia and the United States to refrain from deploying the offensive military capabilities in Ukraine. The United States now has no
offensive missiles or combat troops in Ukraine.

“I would like to note that while the United States has neither missiles nor combat units in Ukraine, Russia has both,” Dmytro Kuleba,
Ukraine’s foreign minister, said in a video call with foreign reporters. “And if this proposal is accepted on a reciprocal basis, that will
imply that Russia has to withdraw. So, no, we have no objections against the idea of Russia withdrawing its forces, its personnel and
its weapons from the territory of Ukraine.”

Mr. Kuleba said Ukraine and the U.S. have similar assessments of the threat of a Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Just last week, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and President Biden seemed to take starkly different positions on the threat
Russia poses to Ukraine. The United States has said an attack could come at any day, while Mr. Zelensky has urged Ukrainians to
remain calm and put their trust in a diplomatic resolution.

But Mr. Kuleba said Washington and Kyiv are on the same page regarding the Russian threat.

“Ukraine and our partners, including the United States, have no difference in assessing risks of current Russian escalation,” Mr.
Kuleba said, thanking the U.S. for mobilizing international support for Ukraine.

“The tone of voice of our messages may sound different,” Mr. Kuleba said. “But the actual assessment is the same: Everything is
possible, and we should be preparing for every possible scenario.”

— Andrew E. Kramer
Putin accuses the U.S. of trying to goad Russia into starting a conflict in Ukraine.
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin said on Tuesday that the United States was trying to pull Russia into an armed conflict over
Ukraine that Russia did not want, cautioning that the West had not yet satisfied Russia’s demands for a sphere of influence in Eastern
Europe but that he hoped “dialogue will be continued.”

Mr. Putin has massed more than 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, in what American officials have warned could be a prelude
to an invasion. But Mr. Putin accused the United States of trying to goad his government into launching a conflict to create a pretext
for tougher Western sanctions against Russia.

“Their most important task is to contain Russia’s development,” he said of the United States, repeating one of his frequent talking
points. “Ukraine is just an instrument of achieving this goal. It can be done in different ways, such as pulling us into some armed
conflict and then forcing their allies in Europe to enact those harsh sanctions against us that are being discussed today in the United
States.”

In Washington, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, reacted derisively to Mr. Putin’s comments, comparing them to “when the
fox is screaming from the top of the henhouse that he’s scared of the chickens.”

“We know who the fox is in this case,” she said. “Russia has 100,000 troops on the border,” she added. “They are the aggressor.”

A State Department spokesman, Ned Price, declined to respond directly to Mr. Putin’s statements, saying, “I will leave it to the
Kremlinologists out there — budding, professional, amateur or otherwise — to read the tea leaves and try to interpret the significance
of those remarks.”

Mr. Putin’s comments, at a news conference in Moscow with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, marked the first time since
December that he had spoken publicly about the crisis.

The Kremlin has demanded in writing that NATO not expand eastward, guaranteeing that Ukraine will never join the alliance, and
that NATO draw down forces in Eastern European countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or part of its orbit. American and
European officials have dismissed such demands as non-starters.

Mr. Putin described the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO as an existential threat to world peace. He said that a Western-allied
Ukraine strengthened with NATO weapons could launch a war against Russia to recapture Crimea, leading to war between Russia
and the NATO bloc. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was not recognized as legitimate by the international community.

The United States and NATO delivered written responses to Russia’s demands last week. Russia has not yet responded formally, but
Mr. Putin said it was clear “that the principal Russian concerns turned out to be ignored.”

Mr. Putin threatened in December that Russia would take unspecified “military-technical” measures if the West did not meet its
demands.

He did not repeat the threat on Tuesday, instead sounding a somewhat optimistic note, describing the diplomacy that has been
underway. He noted that President Emmanuel Macron of France could soon visit Moscow.

“I hope that eventually we will find this solution though it’s not easy, we understand that,” Mr. Putin said. “But to talk today about
what that will be — I am, of course, not ready to do that.”

Mr. Putin and people close to him have said publicly that Ukraine, with its longstanding political and cultural ties to Russia, is not a
legitimate country.
Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Rome and David E. Sanger from Washington.

— Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko

Key takeaways from a flurry of diplomacy in the Ukraine crisis.

 The Ukrainian Army at a front-line position in the eastern part of the country on Wednesday. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

When he spoke about Ukraine on Tuesday for the first time in over a month, President Vladimir V. Putin’s signal that Russia was open
to a diplomatic resolution seemed to cool temperatures — at least for the moment. But it also illustrated the vast gulf between
Moscow’s demands and what Western nations are even willing to discuss.

Here are some takeaways:

President Putin breaks his silence.

It was notable that Mr. Putin did not repeat his earlier threatening language on Tuesday, saying that “dialogue will be continued.”

But he made it clear that the chasm between what Russia wants and what the United States and NATO will discuss remains vast.

He also continued to accuse the West of trying to goad Russia into a conflict, saying that the crisis was an attempt “to contain Russia’s
development” and a pretext for imposing economic sanctions.

The U.S. has slightly toned down its warnings, but is sending more troops.

Amid a burst of diplomatic meetings — and after criticism from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that the United States’ talk
of war was unhelpful — the Biden administration appears to have softened its tone.

“We are still pursuing a diplomatic solution to give the Russians an off-ramp,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, told NPR on Tuesday.

But President Biden’s deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to Eastern Europe, which officials announced on
Wednesday, signaled that the threat of conflict has not passed.

European leaders are pursuing one-on-one contact with Mr. Putin.

European nations have a keen interest in defusing tensions, partly because if a Russian invasion prompts harsh sanctions against
Moscow, their economies — which are far more closely linked to Russia’s than that of the United States — would suffer.

— Marc Santora and Shashank Bengali

See how Ukraine is training civilians to resist an attack by Russia.

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Tactical movements, explosives identification, applying tourniquets — these are just some of the skills
Ukrainians are learning as the country tries to prepare the civilian population to become an insurgent force against an invading army.

It’s part of a national resistance strategy the military here is betting on: relying on the country’s men and women to support regular
troops who would likely be overwhelmed if Russia unleashed a full-scale assault on Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has accelerated such training in response to Russia’s aggressive military buildup along the border, and
aims to enlist 130,000 reservists to be fully mobilized when needed. The enlisted will be on call to take up weapons and body armor
provided by the military, and report to one of 150 battalions and 25 brigades across the country.

“If we’re in the hour of need, these people can come to help us and they will already have the basic knowledge,” said Andrii Kibalnyk, a
lieutenant with Ukraine’s Armed Forces, who helped coordinate a recent training course. “It’s urban warfare, they need to have the
skills for urban warfare.”

Watch the video report here.

— Masha Froliak, Brent McDonald, Yousur Al-Hlou, Dmitriy Khavin and Andriy Dubchak

The U.S. sends a high-ranking security official to help NATO brace for Russian cyberattacks.

Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber- and emerging technology, at
a White House news conference last year. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The White House dispatched its top cyberdefense official to NATO on Tuesday, in what it described as a mission to
prepare allies to deter, and perhaps disrupt, Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine, and to brace for the possibility that sanctions on
Moscow could lead to a wave of retaliatory cyberattacks on Europe and the United States.

The visit by Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber- and emerging technology, underscores recent
intelligence assessments that an invasion of Ukraine would almost certainly be preceded by renewed cyberattacks on Ukraine’s
electric grid, communications systems and government ministries.

All of those systems have been targets of Russian cyberattacks in the past six years, including some innovative strikes in recent
weeks. Ukraine has often been President Vladimir V. Putin’s testing ground for Russia’s arsenal of cyberweapons.

“We have been warning for weeks and months, both publicly and privately, that cyberattacks could be part of a broad-based Russian
effort to destabilize and further invade Ukraine,’’ the White House said in a statement about dispatching Ms. Neuberger.

The U.S. government has been sending teams quietly into Ukraine to help shore up the country’s cyberdefenses. But those experts are
reporting back to Washington that there is relatively little they can do to fundamentally harden the system in a few weeks.

Ms. Neuberger’s trip is largely focused on how to coordinate a NATO response should Russia once again attack parts of the power grid
in Ukraine. That grid is still connected to Russia’s own electric supply network, a huge vulnerability that Ukrainian officials vowed to
fix after attacks that turned out the lights in 2015 and 2016.

Ukraine is scheduled to conduct some long-planned experiments in coming weeks that involve disconnecting from the Russian
networks and connecting, instead, to other European power grids. But the effort is preliminary, and experts say any project to
separate Ukraine’s grid from Russia’s will take years.

If Russia conducts cyberattacks on Ukraine that are not connected to a traditional military invasion, American officials acknowledge it
is uncertain how Europe would respond. As Mr. Biden himself noted at a news conference in Washington two weeks ago, the allies are
divided on what kind of response would be triggered by a short-of-war action.
Trying to explain Mr. Biden’s position, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, suggested in a statement that when he spoke of a
“minor incursion” he had “cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics” in mind, all of which fall short of traditional military attacks. “Those
acts of Russian aggression will be met with a decisive, reciprocal, and united response,” the statement said.

NATO and the European Union have never acted in concert in responding to a broad cyberattack. When Russia was blamed for the
SolarWinds supply chain attack in late 2020 and early 2021, which affected the Federal government and hundreds of global firms, only
the United States issued sanctions.

Increasingly, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — all members, with the United States, of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance
that grew out of World War II — have joined the United States in issuing some joint warnings, or endorsing conclusions about which
countries were responsible for major hacks. NATO did the same last year in identifying China as a culprit when the security of a
Microsoft system used around the globe was pierced. Still, NATO has not forged a consensus among its 30 member states about how
to deal with short-of-war attacks in cyberspace.

— David E. Sanger

In clashing with the U.S. over Ukraine, Putin has a lifeline from China.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, via a video link in Moscow in December. Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik, via
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIJING — As the United States moves to exert maximal pressure on Russia over fears of a Ukraine invasion, President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia has found relief from his most powerful partner on the global stage: China.

China has expressed support for Mr. Putin’s grievances against the United States and NATO, joined Russia to try to block action on
Ukraine at the United Nations Security Council, and brushed aside American warnings that an invasion would create “global security
and economic risks” that could consume China, too.

On Friday, Mr. Putin will meet in Beijing with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics that
President Biden and other leaders have pointedly vowed to boycott.

Although details of any potential agreements between the two countries have not been disclosed, the meeting itself — Mr. Xi’s first in
person with a world leader in nearly two years — is expected to be yet another public display of geopolitical amity between the two
powers.

A Chinese promise of economic and political support for Mr. Putin could undermine Mr. Biden’s strategy to ostracize the Russian
leader for his military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. It could also punctuate a tectonic shift in the rivalry between the United States
and China that could reverberate from Europe to the Pacific.
— Steven Lee Myers and Edward Wong

Why Ukraine is important to Putin.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the presidential residence in Strelna, outside St.
Petersburg, in December. Alexey Nikolsky/Ria Novosti, via Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images

In speeches, interviews and lengthy articles, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his close associates have telegraphed a
singular fixation on Ukraine. The Kremlin thesis goes that Ukrainians are “one people” with Russians, living in a failing state
controlled by Western forces determined to divide and conquer the post-Soviet world.

Ukrainians, who ousted a Russia-friendly president in 2014 and are increasingly in favor of binding their country to Western
institutions, would largely beg to differ. But Mr. Putin’s conviction finds a receptive ear among many Russians, who see themselves as
linked intimately with Ukraine by generations of linguistic, cultural, economic, political and family ties.

Russians often view Kyiv, now the Ukrainian capital and once the center of the medieval Kyivan Rus, as the birthplace of their nation.
Well-known Russian-language writers, such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, came from Ukraine, as did the Communist
revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Ukrainian is Ukraine’s official language, but Russian — which is closely related — is still widely spoken. Ukraine’s president,
Volodymyr Zelensky, now speaks Ukrainian in public but first gained fame as a Russian-language comedian who performed across the
former Soviet Union.

To Mr. Putin — and many other Russians — the conflict with Ukraine is about a hurt national psyche, a historical injustice to be set
right. One of his former advisers, Gleb O. Pavlovsky, in an interview described the Kremlin’s view of Ukraine as a “trauma wrapped in
a trauma” — the dissolution of the Soviet Union coupled with the separation of a nation Russians long viewed as simply an extension
of their own.

Mr. Putin has years of grievances about what he sees as Western overreach in Eastern Europe, and Ukraine has been the object of
decades of Kremlin efforts to keep it within Moscow’s sway.

Mr. Putin also argues that a greater Western military presence represents an existential threat to Russia. Nuclear missiles placed
there, he has said, would be able to reach Moscow with just a few minutes’ warning. American officials say the United States has no
plans to base such missiles in Ukraine.

— Anton Troianovski