![US ambassador to UN says Putin's claim he's sending 'peacekeepers' into eastern Ukraine is 'nonsense'](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220221182916-03-un-security-council-meeting-0221-thomas-greenfield-super-tease.jpg)
US ambassador to UN says Putin's claim he's sending 'peacekeepers' into eastern Ukraine is 'nonsense'
CNN
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russian President Vladimir Putin's recognition of pro-Moscow regions in Ukraine as independent was an "attempt to create a pretext for a further invasion of Ukraine" and that his claim that the Russian forces he has ordered to enter those regions are "peacekeepers" is simply "nonsense."
"We know what they really are," Thomas-Greenfield said of those forces in remarks at a last-minute UN Security Council meeting Monday night.
The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting following Putin's decrees earlier Monday that recognized two pro-Moscow territories in Ukraine as independent, ordering troops to the Donbas region.
![](/newspic/picid-6252001-20250206034049.jpg)
The CIA has sent the White House an unclassified email listing all new hires that have been with the agency for two years or less in an effort to comply with an executive order to downsize the federal workforce, according to three sources familiar with the matter – a deeply unorthodox move that could potentially expose the identities of those officers to foreign government hackers.
![](/newspic/picid-6252001-20250205191707.jpg)
Trump administration officials are hurrying to catch up to the president’s audacious and improbable plan for the United States to take ownership of Gaza and redevelop it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” trying to wrap their heads around an idea that some hope might be so outlandish it forces other nations to step in with their own proposals for the Palestinian enclave.