United States Orders Families Of Diplomats To Leave Ukraine

The US State Department has ordered the families of US embassy staff in Ukraine to begin evacuating the country, according to local media.

The American channel “Fox News” reported on Saturday, quoting American officials (on condition of anonymity) that “the State Department has ordered the families of employees of the United States Embassy in Ukraine to prepare for leaving the country, starting next Monday.

The US State Department is expected to encourage US nationals to start flying out of Ukraine on commercial flights as early as next week “while they are still available”, one of the officials said.

The United States sent new military aid to Ukraine. A US cargo plane carrying 90 tons of “lethal aid, including ammunition for Ukraine’s frontline defence”, landed in Kyiv overnight from Friday to Saturday, the US embassy said on his Twitter account.

Diplomatic initiatives continue to defuse tensions and avert war, as the world closely follows Russian military movements on the front line and along the Ukrainian border.

Russia is currently conducting joint exercises with Belarus in the north and has massed around 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border.

Western countries and Kyiv accuse Moscow of massing its troops on Ukraine’s borders with a view to attacking the country.

Moscow claims that this military deployment is a reaction to the “threatening presence” of NATO in what it considers to be its sphere of influence and refuses any enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance towards Eastern Europe.

Washington threatened to impose sanctions on Russia if it launched an offensive against Ukraine.

For almost 7 years, relations between Kyiv and Moscow have been escalating in tension, due to Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and its support for separatists loyal to it in the “Donbass”.