CNN: US has a "four-week window" to prevent Russian invasion of Ukraine

Lithuania is ready to transfer lethal weapons to Ukraine.

A senior US official said the country has about four weeks to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is reported by CNN citing sources. 

"What we are doing is very calculated. But we have only about a four-week window to carry it out," the official said. 

According to him, when the US intelligence community first saw signs in the autumn that Russia might be preparing a new attack on Ukraine, President Joe Biden ordered his administration to act quickly. 

CNN notes that senior Biden officials said the consequences would go beyond anything Russia has faced since it seized part of Ukrainian territory in 2014. 

A White House representative said: "The sanctions we imposed on Russia in 2014 were mainly aimed at containing the medium- and long-term development of specific Russian state companies by restricting their access to capital markets and US technology." 

The options now on the table "will be overwhelming, immediate, and will entail significant losses for the Russian economy and financial system." 

US officials said that in 2014, when Biden was vice president, his push to arm Ukraine and impose extremely tough sanctions on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine was largely rejected by President Barack Obama. 

A senior NATO official said Biden firmly believes Ukraine cannot be excluded from any discussions concerning its future. European diplomats told the publication that the US administration had at an early stage shared unusually detailed intelligence on Russia's movements with NATO, the G7 and European allies. 

A former senior NATO official who retired in September 2021 said: "I did not see this level of coordination at the beginning of 2014." 

Tom Malinowski
former US assistant secretary of state

What Putin is potentially preparing for requires actions that will be far more visible than what we saw in 2014. The forces he is accumulating are exactly the forces you would accumulate if preparing for a full-scale ground invasion of the country, which did not happen in 2014 with the Russian "little green men." 

Lithuania is ready to transfer lethal weapons

Lithuania's Minister of National Defence said the country is ready to transfer lethal weapons to Ukraine. He did not specify what weapons Lithuania would transfer to Ukraine. 

Arvydas Anušauskas
Lithuanian Minister of Defence

Ukraine must be supported in every way, and Lithuania is ready for this, including transferring lethal weapons to Ukraine. <...> I will not answer directly now, this is a matter of a multilateral agreement, because several states are involved, not only the donor and recipient of weapons, but also the producer and supplier. 

"There should be and will be enough weapons"

Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov said that in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, "there should be and will be enough weapons." 

According to him, over the weekend he visited a company that produces weapons together with Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. 

He noted that "nothing pleases the eye and calms the soul" like new UAR-15 rifles, UAR-10 and UAR-10M sniper rifles, or domestically produced UBR-008.

Oleksiy Danilov
Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council

This means that to ensure we have enough rifles at the "H-hour" to meet all the "little green men" and other such figures, stimulating private entrepreneurial initiative is one of the important priorities of reforming Ukraine's defense industrial complex. Meanwhile, as sociological surveys show, almost half of Ukraine's residents are ready to fight enemies with weapons in hand in case of an invasion threat. This means there should be and will be enough of these weapons!