German Chancellor visits Ukraine as fears of Russian invasion grow

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also plans to continue on to Moscow, where he will try to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to stand down.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Ukraine on Monday, part of a flurry of Western diplomacy aimed at heading off a feared Russian invasion that some warn could be just days away.

Scholz plans to continue on to Moscow, where he will try to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to stand down.

U.S. officials have warned that Russia could attack this week. Moscow denies it has any such plans but has massed well over 130,000 troops near Ukraine and, in the U.S. view, has built up enough firepower to launch an attack on short notice.

With concerns rising that war could be imminent, some airlines canceled flights to the Ukrainian capital and troops there unloaded fresh shipments of weapons from NATO members Sunday. The United States, Britain and other European nations have told their citizens to leave the country and Washington was also pulling most of its staff from the embassy in Kyiv.

Ukraine’s air traffic safety agency Ukraerorukh declared the airspace over the Black Sea to be a “zone of potential danger” because of Russian naval drills and recommended that planes avoid flying over the sea Feb. 14-19.

The U.S. and its NATO allies have repeatedly warned that Russia will pay a high price for any invasion — but they have sometimes struggled to present a united front. Scholz’s government, in particular, has been criticized for refusing to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine or to spell out which sanctions it would support against Russia, raising questions about Berlin’s resolve to stand up to Moscow.

The chancellor’s visits this week will thus be closely watched for a signs of deviating from the message delivered by Washington and other NATO allies — but it is also seen as a last-ditch effort to head off war.

So far, those warnings appear to have had little effect: Russia has only beefed up troops and weapons in the region and launched massive drills in its ally Belarus, which also neighbors Ukraine. The West fears that the drills, which will run through Sunday, could be used by Moscow as a cover for an invasion from the north.