US troops ‘ready to go’ to bolster Nato forces, says White House

Bloomberg

A Kremlin spokesman warned that a US move to put as many as 8,500 troops on alert “exacerbates tensions,” as a top White House official said the reinforcements for Nato forces in Eastern Europe are “ready to go at a moment’s notice.”
Evidence also emerged that European governments are split on what Russian actions short of a military attack on Ukraine should trigger sanctions. French President Emmanuel Macron’s Russia adviser is in Moscow to present proposals for deescalation — and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was likely to host Macron in Berlin.
Russia has massed thousands of troops, tanks and equipment near Ukraine’s eastern border and the US and its allies say it could be preparing for military action. Moscow has denied it intends to invade.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said if the “worst happens” in Ukraine the country’s resistance “would be dogged and tenacious, and the bloodshed comparable to the first war in Chechnya or Bosnia or any other conflict that Europe has endured since 1945.”
Johnson was speaking in Parliament after his Cabinet discussed a package of sanctions against Russia if it invades. Earlier, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said it’s “unlikely” that UK combat troops will be sent to Ukraine, and announced that she will visit the country next week.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has asked Germany and several other member states blocking a mission to Ukraine to train local military and security staff to reconsider their positions, diplomats familiar with the matter said.
Germany, Greece and several other countries have been preventing the EU mission from taking place due to concern it might provoke Russia, the diplomats said.
The US administration has been evaluating possible restrictions on exporting semiconductor chips to Russia, CNBC reported, without naming the source of its information.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a frontrunner in April’s presidential election, said sanctions on Russia are counterproductive and warned against “a new Cold War” led by the US
Such a conflict could “push Russia into the arms of China” and “lead to the creation of a Sino-Russian empire,” Le Pen said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We were completely sidelined from the discussions between the US and Russia,” she added. “This shows how much influence we have lost.”
The US is coordinating with the EU and Nato on its written response to Russia’s demands about Nato and Ukraine, according to an EU official who asked not to be identified.
The reply is unlikely to be a detailed discussion of those requirements, the official said, but will set out areas where western allies believe they can address Russian concerns, as well as Russian actions that are alarming to Europe.
The UK’s armed-forces minister has claimed, without providing further details, that Britain is aware of “a significant number of individuals that are assessed to be associated with Russian military advance-force operations and currently located in Ukraine.”
Moscow hit back at separate UK allegations that it’s plotting to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv. Those assertions, offered without a timeline on the intelligence, were contained in a UK Foreign Office statement.
Tobias Lindner, a deputy German foreign minister, defended the government’s policy of not supplying Ukraine with weapons, arguing that there could never be a military solution to the conflict.