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COLUMN-Ukraine-Russia crisis is now a complex global confrontation: Peter Apps

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)

By Peter Apps

LONDON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - As the United States and European countries struggled to find a unified approach to Russia and Ukraine this week, the Russian navy announced a multitude of new exercises, from deploying its Black Sea Fleet to missile drills off Ireland, and Belarus opposition hackers said they were behind a cyber attack disrupting Russian troop moves as more fighter jets arrived.

Just how close war might be is contested. The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine said a Russian invasion could happen "any day", and Britain and Canada withdrew non-essential diplomatic staff. Ukrainian officials publicly dispute that the threat is quite so imminent, while lobbying furiously for international aid and weaponry -- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday that Russia was likely to remain on a diplomatic track with Kyiv and the West for at least two weeks.

Senior French officials have also expressed doubt that an invasion is imminent. "We see the same number of lorries, tanks and people," one told Le Monde newspaper. "We observed the same manoeuvres, but cannot conclude an offensive is imminent."

Germany's top naval officer told an audience in India that all Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted was respect, and that he probably "deserved" it.

Those comments provoked widespread complaints both in Germany and beyond, prompting the resignation of Admiral Kay-Achim Schonbach. But they fuelled antagonism between Germany's new government and its allies, with Berlin blocking the re-export of German arms from Estonia to Ukraine.

There are now an ever-growing number of moving parts to an increasingly complex confrontation.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said the United States would deploy thousands of troops to eastern Europe if Russia continued its military buildup or invaded Ukraine, referring to a "sacred obligation" to protect Europe. French, German, Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Paris on Wednesday to try to restart stalled and largely bypassed "Normandy" group talks on the conflict between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

While Russian officials say NATO states are in what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called a "militaristic frenzy", Moscow is now also taking assertive military activity elsewhere, a move it partly blames on what it says are NATO actions in the Black Sea and Baltic.