Russia-Ukraine live updates: Biden to speak about Ukraine amid unconfirmed reports of evacuations from separatist area

KYIV, Ukraine — The Russian-backed leader of a separatist-controlled area of eastern Ukraine said Friday that officials there were launching a mass evacuation of civilians into neighboring Russia, citing the threat of military action in the region by Ukrainian troops.

An exodus from Ukraine into Russia, which could not immediately be confirmed, would be seen as a signal that major military activities are imminent.

Denis Pushilin, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine’s Donbas region, said in a video address that Russia had agreed to accept residents of the region and that checkpoints and border crossings were ready to speed their movement.

“First of all, women, children and the elderly are subject to evacuation,” Pushilin said. “By agreement with the leadership of the Russian Federation, places to take in and accommodate our citizens are ready in the Rostov region” of western Russia.

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a response to a question from a reporter about the reports of an evacuation from Donbas, said, “I have no information about what is happening there now.”

Pushilin beseeched residents of the region to leave the area, at least temporarily, to “save their life.” Pushilin claimed without presenting evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “will soon give an order to … invade the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.”

The evacuation announcement is particularly worrying, coming after Russian President Vladimir Putin twice accused Ukraine of “genocide” in the separatist east during a news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday. There are fears that the evacuation itself could be used by Moscow as a pretext to launch an attack, on the basis of claims that Ukraine’s military mounted major attacks. Peskov warned this week of the “high risk” of a Ukrainian attack on the separatist regions.

Many civilians in the region fled over the border to Russia during fighting in 2014 and 2015, but there was no organized mass evacuation.

Russia’s Interfax news agency, citing an unnamed source, said officials were planning for the evacuation of “several hundreds of thousands of people.”

“Accommodation centers have already been set up for them,” Interfax quoted the source as saying.

Putin noted the spiking tensions, which he also blamed on Ukraine and its Western allies, during a news conference Friday in Moscow. “All Kyiv needs to do is sit down at the negotiating table with representatives of Donbas and agree on political, military, economic and humanitarian measures to end the conflict,” Putin said.

“Unfortunately now we are seeing the opposite — the escalation of the conflict in Donbas.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba rejected accusations that Ukraine was poised to launch a major attack on Donbas. “We categorically refute Russian disinformation reports on Ukraine’s alleged offensive operations or acts of sabotage in chemical production facilities,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter. “Ukraine does not conduct or plan any such actions in the Donbas. We are fully committed to diplomatic conflict resolution only.”

David L. Stern in Lviv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.