Separatists in Ukraine have asked for Russian help to repel "aggression" and Kyiv announced compulsory military service and a state of emergency, as the West slapped more sanctions on Moscow in a bid to stop an all-out invasion.
In one of the worst post-Cold War security crises in Europe for decades, convoys of military equipment, including nine tanks, moved towards the eastern Ukrainian area of Donetsk from the direction of the Russian border on Wednesday, a Reuters witness reported.
Shelling has intensified in the east, where Russian President Vladimir Putin has recognised two separatist regions as independent and ordered the deployment of what he called peacekeepers, a move the West calls the start of an invasion.
But there was still no clear indication of whether Putin will launch a massed assault on Ukraine with the tens of thousands of troops he has gathered on its borders. Moscow has long denied that it has plans to invade.
The leaders of the two breakaway areas want Putin to intervene.
"I am asking for help to repel the Ukrainian regime's military aggression against the population of the Donetsk People's Republic," said Denis Pushilin who heads the area Moscow recognised as independent, according to TASS news agency.
The White House rejected the comments as another Russian false flag operation, a fake crisis manufactured to justify greater Russian military intervention in Ukraine.
"This is an example of it," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
"That is suggesting that they feel under threat. By whom? The Ukrainians that the Russians are threatening to attack?"
Kyiv warned the move was an escalation of Russia's military pressure and sought an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Moscow had approved an offensive and not replied to an invitation for talks.
"Today I initiated a telephone conversation with the President of the Russian Federation. The result was silence," he said.
UN chief Antonio Guterres has dismissed claims of a genocide in eastern Ukraine. Under international law, genocide is an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
A total of 80 per cent of the soldiers assembled are in a position to launch a full-scale invasion on Ukraine, a senior US defence official said.
Satellite imagery taken on Wednesday showed new deployments in western Russia, many of them within 15km of the border with Ukraine and less than 80km from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, a US company Maxar said.
The images showed field deployment, military convoys, artillery and armoured personnel carriers with support equipment and troops. The images could not be independently verified by Reuters.
A 30-day state of emergency in Ukraine restricting the freedom of movement of conscripted reservists, curbing the media and imposing personal document checks, according to a draft text, begins on Thursday.
The Ukrainian government has also announced compulsory military service for all men of fighting age.
While the West has held off the most stringent sanctions measures it could impose, the US stepped up the pressure by imposing sanctions on the firm building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and its corporate officers.
"We will not hesitate to take further steps if Russia continues to escalate," said US President Joe Biden.
The White House said the sanctions do not affect former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has headed the shareholders committee of Nord Stream since 2005.
Germany on Tuesday froze approvals for the pipeline, which has been built but was not yet in operation.
Ukrainian government and state websites, which have experienced outages in recent weeks blamed by Kyiv on cyber attacks, were again offline on Wednesday. Ukraine's parliament, cabinet and foreign ministry websites were affected.
For months, Russia has presented the crisis mainly as a dispute with the West, demanding security guarantees, including a promise never to allow Ukraine to join NATO.
But the recognition of the separatist regions was accompanied by much stronger language against Ukraine, which Putin called an artificial construct wrongly carved out of Russia by its enemies.
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