President Biden said Friday he is convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine and that he expects an attack in the coming days, with targets including the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

     

U.S. officials said a Russian attack could involve a broad combination of jet fighters, tanks, ballistic missiles and cyberattacks, with the ultimate intention of rendering Ukraine’s leadership powerless.

      

The officials said Mr. Putin has laid the groundwork in recent days through a series of destabilizing activities and false-flag operations, long predicted by U.S. and allied officials and intended to make it look as if Ukraine has provoked Russia into a conflict, thus justifying the Russian invasion.

           

President Biden said Friday that he expects a Russian attack in the coming days that would target Kyiv. 

       

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden referred to the Kremlin’s efforts to fabricate a pretext for Russian forces to attack, which he said is expected in coming days.

      

“We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people,” Mr. Biden said. He said he was providing the information because “we’re doing everything in our power to remove any reason that Russia may give to justify invading Ukraine and prevent them from moving.”

       

Asked about whether Mr. Putin has given the go-ahead, Mr. Biden said: “I’m convinced he’s made the decision. We have reason to believe that.” An administration official said later the president’s statement reflected the intelligence community’s assessment of the situation.

       

Until an attack occurs, Mr. Biden said that diplomacy remains a possibility. The U.S. officials, however, said prospects for averting war now appear dim.

      

The British Embassy in Kyiv closed, and staff relocated to Lviv, according to an official familiar with the matter. Most of the embassy team has already left the country. The U.S. Embassy relocated to Lviv earlier this week.

      

In eastern Ukraine on Friday, the leaders of two Russian-controlled areas urged civilians to evacuate immediately to Russia. Artillery, tank and mortar exchanges increased along the cease-fire line separating the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donbas region from Russian-held areas, according to accounts from both sides. Kyiv said it had ordered its troops to exercise restraint to avoid giving Russia a pretext to invade.

       

Russia has now amassed between 169,000 and 190,000 military personnel near Ukraine and in Crimea, up from a force of 100,000 on Jan. 30, Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said in prepared remarks to a security conference on Friday.

      

“This is the most significant military mobilization in Europe since the Second World War,” said Mr. Carpenter, who noted that the U.S. estimate includes Russian troops, Russian internal-security units and Russian-led forces in Donbas.

       

The Kremlin and Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Washington’s assessment.

      

Earlier in the day, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a state television program that Russia had told the U.S. Moscow had no intention of invading Ukraine.

      

Ukrainian officials have said in recent weeks that the U.S. is exaggerating the imminence and potential scale of an attack.

       

U.S. officials said that the Russian buildup has grown to 125 battalion tactical groups, up from 83 such groups earlier this month, plus as many as six special-forces brigades. Roughly 40% to 50% of Mr. Putin’s total force near Ukraine is in attack positions, according to the officials, poised for what many intelligence officials say is likely to be a major onslaught over the next week.

       

Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said Friday that Russia was behind the reports of mortar attacks and a broader assault against Russian citizens in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin is using to justify a potential military intervention.

       

“Everything we are seeing, including what you described in the last 24 to 48 hours, is part of a scenario that is already in play of creating false provocations, of then having to respond to those provocations and then ultimately committing new aggression against Ukraine,” Mr. Blinken said at the Munich Security Conference on Friday.

      

The White House on Friday blamed Russia’s intelligence service, the GRU, for recent malicious cyber activity that knocked some Ukrainian financial and government websites offline.

        

“We believe that the Russian government is responsible for wide-scale cyberattacks on Ukrainian banks this week,” said Anne Neuberger, President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.

        

Ms. Neuberger said the U.S. had intelligence showing known GRU computer infrastructure had been transmitting high volumes of data to Ukraine-based IP addresses.

       

Mr. Biden, in his White House remarks, said that If Russia launches an attack, it “will pay a steep price for doing so not only from the sanctions that we and our allies will impose on Russia, but the moral outrage the rest of the world will visit upon them.”

       

Those sanctions would target Russia’s largest financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, while export controls would be aimed to damage Russia’s aerospace, defense and high-technology sectors, deputy national security adviser Daleep Singh told reporters.

        

While the Biden administration has said it won’t send troops to Ukraine, the U.S. and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have sent arms to Ukraine in recent months, including small-arms ammunition, mortar and artillery shells, antitank guided missiles, bunker-busting missiles, grenade launchers, explosive ordnance disposal suits and Mossberg 500 pump-action shotguns, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. The U.K. has supplied thousands of antitank missiles, and the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania sent American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

       

The Pentagon is still moving troops into the region. About 150 soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment are expected to arrive in Hungary from Germany in the coming days, to train alongside Hungarian defense forces. The Pentagon has deployed roughly 5,000 troops to shore up NATO’s eastern flank and to assist in a potential evacuation effort.

       

On Thursday, Mr. Blinken proposed a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, next week in Europe that could lead to a summit of key leaders. Mr. Lavrov agreed to the meeting, but the U.S. said that it would only take place if Russia didn’t invade.

          

Among the Russian forces amassed near Ukraine are battalion tactical groups. Those units, which generally number about 700 to 800 troops each, are manned by professional soldiers instead of conscripts. Built around mechanized infantry or tank battalions, they are reinforced with artillery, air defenses, electronic warfare and other units.

        

Russian troops are moving closer to Ukraine’s border, dispersing along it, and increasing their logistical capacities, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters during a visit to Warsaw on Friday. “We see more forces moving into that region, that border region.”

        

Poland has been a close U.S. ally against Moscow, and is hosting 4,700 U.S. troops being rotated onto Polish territory in response to the Russian escalation around Ukraine. “We all do believe that through being decisive, and through the decisive policy of the free world, especially the United States, there will be no war,” Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said. “We do still hope and believe that there will be no conflict, due to the unity of the free world.”

        

Moscow denies that it intends to invade Ukraine but says that it is duty-bound to protect Russians and Russian speakers in Donbas. It also says it can’t accept Ukraine joining NATO.

        

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who toured the front line in Donbas on Wednesday and Thursday, was slated to fly Saturday to Munich for a series of meetings at the international security conference there, including with Vice President Kamala Harris. Russia isn’t attending this year. Biden administration officials had advised the Ukrainian leader not to leave the country, a U.S. official said, though Mr. Biden said the decision was Mr. Zelensky’s to make.

       

Mobile-phone service stopped functioning for some subscribers in many Ukrainian-controlled parts of Luhansk and Donetsk on Thursday night. Ukrainian officials said Friday that operations of the local Vodafone affiliate were disrupted by Russian-backed saboteurs who destroyed network nodes. While connection was restored hours later, attempts to sabotage communications facilities of all the networks are likely to continue in coming days, they said.

        

—Ann M. Simmons, Nancy A. Youssef, Dustin Volz, Max Colchester, Catherine Lucey and Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

      

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