NATO says Russian military buildup continues as U.S. warns of cyber threat to Ukraine

The U.S. believes the window for a potential attack against Ukraine has been extended by another 4-5 days, which means it could come after  the Olympics and a key gathering of world leaders in Germany this weekend, CBS News' Margaret Brennan reported late Wednesday. 

One U.S. official told Brennan that a provocation could happen at any moment and the ensuing military action may be a few days later One potential flashpoint is the Donbas region, Brennan reported. Russian propaganda is in overdrive right now, focusing on atrocities in Donbass, which Putin called a genocide 

The U.S. and European allies are slightly different in their assessment of Putin's motives, with some Europeans believing that Putin is trying to get the West to negotiate with a gun to its head. 

As the U.N. Security Council plans a meeting on Thursday, called by Russia, on Ukraine and the Minsk agreements — which aim to secure a ceasefire between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces in the eastern part of the country — Russia's Deputy Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told CBS News' Pamela Falk that Russia has no intention to invade.

Polyanskiy said Russia should be responding to a U.S. de-escalation proposal in the next few days, but that decision would be made in Moscow. He accused President Biden's U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield of carrying out unhelpful "megaphone diplomacy" at the U.N.

Excerpts of the interview with CBS News' Pamela Falk are here:

CBS News: Why are the troops there?

Deputy Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy:  East of Ukraine, civil conflict — Ukrainian troops shelling civil population in the Donbas. This is near the very proximity to our borders. We have all the reasons to be worried. That's why so there they are. They're in different numbers from time to time, but it's absolutely our house business and it doesn't concern you anyway.

CBS News: Tell me in your words, your assessment is that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine?

Polyanskiy: Have you heard any Russian official, any Russian politician, any Russian deputy ever saying that Russia has intentions to attack Ukraine? You will have none.

CBS News: That's a rhetorical answer. Does Russia have no intention of invading?

Polyanskiy: We have repeatedly said that all the levels … Western public is turning deaf ears for such assurances from our side and I don't even understand, why do we need to give such assurance? We have our troops on our territory. …

Absolutely nothing is happening. It's only happening in the West, in the minds of Western politicians. We're not caught between war and peace. We're living our normal daily life, or military conduct training that was announced months ago. 

Now, certain troops have been withdrawn already. And people say that this is because Russia bent to Western pressure, which is nonsense. Absolutely. This was … planned long before. Nothing is happening. Open your eyes.

The U.S. government has assessed that Russian cyber actors likely have broadly targeted the Ukrainian government, including the military, and critical infrastructure networks to collect intelligence and prepare for disruptive cyber activities, which could potentially be leveraged if Russia invades Ukraine, U.S. officials tell CBS News. 

Russia could seek to disrupt critical Ukrainian infrastructure — such as entities in the energy, transportation, finance and telecommunications sectors — either to support military operations or cause widespread panic in an attempt to destabilize the country, U.S. officials add. 

U.S. officials would not go as far as to say that Ukrainian critical infrastructure sectors have been penetrated by Russian-linked actors. 

Ukrainian cyber officials, meanwhile, tell CBS News there is "no evidence" that Russian actors have broadly penetrated Ukraine's critical infrastructure. However, the government's cyber security agency did concede last month that hackers suspected of being linked to the Kremlin successfully employed specially designed malware against two of Ukraine's government agencies. Ukrainian cyber officials say they are "constantly monitoring" for state-backed cyber targeting of critical infrastructure, and the situation remains "under control."

As for Tuesday's cyber incident, top Ukrainian cyber official Victor Zhora tells CBS News that it was the "largest DDoS attack" in the country's history, referring to the distributed denial of service attack that targeted some Ukrainian financial institutions and government entities. 

So far, there is no information indicating other disruptive actions have been hidden by yesterday's DDoS attack, but Ukrainian investigators and their partners continue to collect information. 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia believes that the likelihood of a Ukrainian military operation in the disputed Donbas region of eastern Ukraine is "high and real."

"The attention of our interlocutors is drawn in every possible way to this dangerous concentration [of the Ukrainian troops at the engagement line in Donbas] and the attention of our interlocutors is drawn to the fact that a military operation and an attempt to resolve problems with the use of force in the southeast [of Ukraine] are quite real," Peskov said, according to the Russian state media outlet TASS.

U.S. and allied officials have warned for weeks that Russia could stage a "false flag" operation accusing Ukraine of attacking ethnic Russians in the region as a pretext for a wider invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and Ukraine consider Donbas part of Ukraine, despite Russian-backed militias' firm control over the territory.

The Pentagon said Russian jets conducted "unprofessional intercepts" of three U.S. Navy surveillance planes flying in international airspace over the Mediterranean Sea last weekend, the latest close encounters between Russian and U.S. aircraft as tensions remain high over the situation in Ukraine.

Captain Mike Kafka, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed the incidents in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

"We have made our concerns known to Russian officials through diplomatic channels. While no one was hurt, interactions such as these could result in miscalculations and mistakes that lead to more dangerous outcomes," Kafka said. "The U.S. will continue to operate safely, professionally and consistent with international law in international waters and airspace. We expect Russia to do the same."

A defense official said one Russian jet came "very close" to a P-8A Poseidon aircraft, which the Navy uses for reconnaissance.

NATO recently conducted large-scale naval exercises in the Mediterranean that included an American carrier strike group, prompting Russia to announce exercises of its own in late January.

The U.S. government released a new cybersecurity advisory Wednesday warning that officials "have observed regular targeting of U.S. security-cleared defense contractors (known as CDCs) by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors" to try to obtain sensitive information on U.S. defense and intelligence operations and programs. 

The joint bulletin — issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), FBI and NSA —notes that between January 2020 and February 2022, cyber criminals backed by Russia have targeted both large and small defense contractors in an effort to access unclassified information and technology concerning "weapons development, communications infrastructure, technological and scientific research, and other potentially sensitive details." 

"Over the last several years, we have observed and documented a host of malicious activity conducted by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors targeting U.S. critical infrastructure," CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement. "Today's joint advisory with our partners at FBI and NSA is the latest report to detail these persistent threats to our nation's safety and security. Everyone has a role to play to combat this and other Russian cyber threats, and we encourage all organizations of every size to take action to mitigate risks to their networks."   

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security held a call on Monday to warn law enforcement, military and U.S. infrastructure stakeholders to be prepared for potential Russian cyberattacks that correspond with a possible invasion of Ukraine. For weeks, U.S. cybersecurity officials across government have publicly and privately urged U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators to dramatically lower their threshold for reporting suspicious activity amid a state of heightened alert.   

Wednesday's advisory comes after several critical Ukrainian websites, including two of the nation's largest banks and its defense ministry, were temporarily knocked offline Tuesday following an apparent cyberattack that flooded websites with traffic to disrupt operations.

NATO issued a statement on Wednesday on behalf of the alliance's defense ministers, who were gathered in Brussels, warning Moscow of the alliance's grave concern over what it called "the very large scale, unprovoked and unjustified Russian military build-up" around Ukraine.

"Russia's actions pose a serious threat to Euro-Atlantic security," the statement said, adding that NATO was already responding to the threat by sending additional forces into countries on its eastern flank, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia on Russia's border, and Poland. The U.S. recently announced the deployment of 3,000 additional troops to the region as part of that strengthening of forces.

"We urge Russia, in the strongest possible terms, to choose the path of diplomacy, and to immediately reverse its buildup and withdraw its forces from Ukraine in accordance with its international obligations and commitments," the statement said. 

Echoing President Biden's remarks on Tuesday, the NATO statement made clear that should Russia go beyond bullying Ukraine with its troop buildup to threaten any NATO member states directly, "We stand united to defend each other."

If Vladimir Putin genuinely has decided against invading Ukraine, it's likely because the U.S. and its allies have made the costs too high. It's done that by supplying weapons to Ukraine, and by threatening Russia's leader with unprecedented sanctions that would target not only his government, but his inner circle and their family members.

As White House press secretary Jen Psaki has noted, many of those people "are particularly vulnerable targets" for sanctions because of their huge financial holdings in Western nations.

"Vladimir Putin is a human rights violator, and a kleptocrat, and a very rich man," Bill Browder told CBS News. The British-American financier was once one of the biggest foreign investors in Russia — until he started campaigning against Russian corruption. 

Browder told CBS News that Putin has been treated too softly by the West in the past, and that has sent a dangerous message.

"He invaded Georgia. He took Crimea… He bombed civilians and hospitals in Syria. He cheated in the Olympics," Browder said. "From his standpoint, he's gotten away with everything, and unless we can actually prove to him that we're serious, he'll think he can get away with it again."

With their consistent warnings of "swift and severe" sanctions, the U.S. and its allies may finally be getting the point across.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Ukrainian media in an interview on Wednesday that the U.S. had "yet to see any pullback, any withdrawal of Russian forces from around Ukraine's borders," but he said if if it were to become "clear that Russia is truly engaged on a diplomatic path and the military threat goes away, of course, that changes the situation."

Citing a similar comment from Ukraine's own foreign minister on Tuesday, Blinken said "it's very important to look at what Russia actually does, not what it says it's doing."

"We have not seen a definitive decision by President Putin, but we do know that he's put in place the capacity to act on very, very short notice," Blinken warned the Ukrainian people. "It's important to... put Russia on notice that we see what it's planning and we see what it might do."

Russian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to send a formal request to President Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that if Putin were to sign the legislation, it would "amount to the Russian government's wholesale rejection of its commitments" under previously negotiated but never fully implemented peace agreements known as the Minsk Accords.

Both the West and Russia have said they view the Minsk Accords, which ended major fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in Donbas in 2015, as roadmaps to a diplomatic solution to the current crisis. While the war in Donbas was quieted by the agreements, the fighting never completely stopped.  

The appeal to recognize the breakaway regions, which call themselves the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic, is now on Putin's desk, but the Russian leader has given no indication that he'll approve the measure.

"Enactment of this resolution would further undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, constitute a gross violation of international law, call into further question Russia's stated commitment to continue to engage in diplomacy to achieve a peaceful resolution of this crisis, and necessitate a swift and firm response from the United States in full coordination with our Allies and partners," Blinken said Wednesday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow, meanwhile, that Putin had said "the main task is to implement the Minsk package of measures," and he added that the Kremlin agreed that recognizing the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk would contradict the Minsk Accords.

A Ukrainian official indicated on Wednesday that his country suspects Russia has a hand in ongoing cyberattacks targeting websites of state-run financial and defense institutions in his country. 

Illya Vityuk, head of the Cybersecurity Department of the state security service (SBU) suggested that it could only be Russia behind the DDOS attacks, which are a relatively unsophisticated form of cyber vandalism that inundates a server with so many hits, it goes offline. 

Since Tuesday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's website and sites belonging to state-owned banks have been offline. The institutions both stressed that their actual work — and Ukrainians' money — were not at risk, as the cyberattack was only affecting their websites.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the cyberattacks.

Vityuk said it was too soon to confirm who was behind the actions, but added: "Today we know that the only country that is interested in such... attacks on our state, especially against the backdrop of massive panic about a possible military invasion, the only country that is interested is the Russian Federation."

While Ukraine has downplayed the impact of the current attacks, CBS News cybersecurity analyst Chris Krebs said they could potentially be the start of something much larger, and Ukraine's ambassador in Washington told CBS News in January, during a previous DDOS attack in her country, that Ukraine expected to see a massive wave of cyberwarfare as a prelude to any full-scale Russian military assault on her country.    

Russia's Ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov, has told Irish television that his country does "not have any plans to invade anybody, least of all Ukraine," reiterating months of denials from Moscow that fly in the face of dire warnings from Washington and Europe that Russia could invade its neighbor, again, at any time.

"We do not have any political, economic, military or [any] other reason to do that. The whole idea is insane," Filatov told the RTE network's show, "Prime Time." 

Asked for a timeline on when Russia would pull its forces back from Ukraine's borders, Filatov said he didn't have "any figures," deferring to his country's defense ministry. Russia's military hasn't provided any real detail on its purported troop movements since Tuesday, either.

"What I can tell [you] is, within maybe three to four weeks, the configuration of the forces in the Western region of Russia will resume its normal standard posture," the ambassador said. "We are conducting planned exercises with Belarusian military forces. They will be over by 20 February and these troops will be withdrawn. You can check on that next week."

On Tuesday's episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell moderated a conversation among a panel of experts including former Deputy Secretary General of NATO Rose Gottemoeller, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia Andrea Kendall-Taylor, and former senior CIA operations officer John Sipher about the Russia-Ukraine crisis and whether diplomatic options remain viable. 

The panel evaluated Russian President Vladimir Putin's immediate and long-term objectives, and discussed how deterrent measures might be enhanced. They also considered possible post-conflict scenarios in the European security landscape.

Gottemoeller suggested that one of the main motivations for Putin's aggression against Ukraine appeared to be a simple desire for attention.   

"This is a this is a 'look at me' moment for Putin, and getting attention. He was seeing, I think, the United States passing Russia by and pivoting to Asia," Gottemoeller said. "This whole crisis has kept Russia, and it's kept Putin, before the global community on the front pages of the newspaper now for a long time. And I think that's part of what is going on here."

Click here to read the full transcript of the panel discussion.  

Russia's military released more video on Wednesday of what it claims are ongoing reductions in the country's military buildup around Ukraine's borders. 

The ministry's latest video shows a train purportedly carrying military hardware out of the Crimean Peninsula back into mainland Russia after military exercises. 

U.S. officials told CBS News on Tuesday, after Russia first suggested an initial drawdown of the estimated 150,000 troops it has surrounding Ukraine's borders, that the movements seen up until that point were irrelevant and likely intended to obscure an increasingly aggressive Russian military posture.

Crimea, a peninsula that Russia unilaterally annexed away from Ukraine with its last invasion in 2014, is literally attached to southern Ukraine, and American officials fear Moscow could use its troop presence there as way to attack from the south. The landmass jutting out into the Black Sea is connected to mainland Russia in the east by a bridge, over which Russian troops and hardware have crossed freely since the annexation in 2014. 

Russia also has about 30,000 troops, along with attack aircraft and heavy weapons, in Belarus, which sits on Ukraine's northwest border. Russia and Belarus insist the joint military exercises they launched on February 10, within 30 miles of Ukrainian territory, pose no threat to the country.

Russia has always said those exercises will conclude on February 20, and on Wednesday, the Belarusian foreign minister vowed that from that date, there wouldn't be a single Russian soldier or weapon on his country's soil.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday welcomed President Biden's willingness to continue negotiating, and in particular the American leader's nod to Russia's own concerns over NATO's eastward expansion.

"President Putin emphasizes our desire and readiness to enter into such negotiations, and it is probably positive that the U.S. President Biden also states his readiness to start such serious negotiations," Peskov told reporters. 

He said there was probably "nothing reprehensible" for Russia in the remarks Mr. Biden delivered on Tuesday afternoon and said it was also welcome that the leader of "one of the largest countries in the world, one of the most powerful states, really thinks about the Russian people. This should impress us."

But Peskov said Russia "would prefer, however, not to listen to various threats about what will happen to us if we do something there [in Ukraine] that we are not going to do," referring to Mr. Biden's warning that Russia could still launch an invasion of its smaller neighbor - something the Kremlin has consistently denied any intention of doing.

In a reference to Russia's claims that Ukrainian forces regularly violate a tentative ceasefire agreement in the eastern Donbas region, where they've fought Russian-backed rebels for almost eight years, Peskov said it "would be even more impressive if the President of the United States also addressed the Ukrainian people and called on the Ukrainian people never to shoot at each other. That would be very cool."  

As the U.S. and NATO cast serious doubt on Russia's claims to be pulling any significant forces out of border regions with Ukraine, Moscow claimed on Wednesday that it was the Western military alliance's own lack of capabilities leaving the alliance uninformed of Russian troop movements. 

"A certain, probably, handicap is present in NATO's system for assessing the state of affairs," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday. 

"This, for sure, does not allow NATO representatives to soberly assess the situation," claimed Peskov. "There are problems in the system for assessing the situation." 

U.S. military and intelligence services have shared little in the way of direct evidence to contradict Russia's claims of troop and military hardware withdrawals, but private satellite company Maxar Technologies routinely releases satellite images showing Russian forces near Ukraine's borders.

The most recent Maxar images were released on Sunday, and the company said they showed a continuing buildup — and a more aggressive positioning — of Russian forces near Ukraine. 

A U.S. official told CBS News senior national security correspondent David Martin on Monday that Russia had moved some long-range artillery and rocket launchers into firing position, threatening Ukraine, and that some Russian units had left assembly areas and were beginning to move into "attack positions." 

President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Wednesday a "Day of Unity" in Ukraine. It was a bid to show his nation is strong and united in the face of Russian intimidation.

It got off to a relatively quiet start, with a handful of people gathering with flags in Kyiv's main Maidan square on the date that some anonymous Western officials had suggested Russia might launch an invasion.

Ukrainians who spoke to CBS News noted Moscow's claims of an initial pullback, but eight years after the Russian leader last sent troops across their border, annexing the Crimean Peninsula in the process, there was little faith in the Kremlin's remarks.

"I don't believe it," Kyiv resident Sasha Kunitska told CBS News. "Russia is aggression for our country, and I don't believe Russia. … I have my emergency bag in my flat, and I'm ready to defend my country if it's needed." 

Another resident of the capital, who only gave his first name, Maxim, said he hoped Russia was telling the truth, but he wasn't sure he could trust its leaders.

"I'm a father, so of course I want to protect my children," he told CBS News. "I have relatives in Russia and they want to divide us. … It's two different countries, and I think that people in Ukraine want to live and have a better life."

Despite Russian reassurances, the U.S. says it's skeptical that Moscow is bringing some of its troops home as worries grow about a possible invasion of Ukraine. Charlie D'Agata reports.