U.S. President Joe Biden is considering deploying several thousand U.S. troops, as well as ships and aircraft, to the Baltics and Eastern Europe amid fears that Russia could launch an invasion of Ukraine.

According to The New York Times, citing sources, on January 22, representatives of the US Department of Defense presented Biden with several options for deploying troops near Russia’s borders.

These options involve sending from one to five thousand troops to the countries of Eastern Europe with the possibility of increasing the size of the group tenfold if the situation worsens. So far, none of the options provides for the deployment of troops in Ukraine.

Joe Biden is expected to make a decision on sending troops in the coming week.

Since the fall of 2021, Russia has deployed about 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine. Western countries admit that Russia may launch an invasion of Ukraine, official Moscow denies this. The Russian authorities explain the movement of Russian troops as exercises and say they are not going to attack anyone. The US fears that Russia will use “speculative explanations and excuses” to cross the border with Ukraine.

On January 17, The New York Times reported that in early 2022, Russia took family members of its diplomatic staff out of Ukraine. A few days later, on January 23, the US State Department announced that it ordered the families of employees of the American embassy in Kiev to leave Ukraine because of the threat of a Russian invasion.

(C)MEDUZA 2022