FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Yannis Behrakis

Opposition politician Mikhail Delyagin claims that Kiev is preparing to attack Russia.

At the behest of the West, Ukraine may strike at Russia in February 2022 and launch an offensive in several directions, including in Crimea, an opposition MP in the Russian State Duma claimed on Sunday.

According to RIA Novosti, the unlikely claim from Mikhail Delyagin suggested that, contrary to what has been reported by many Western publications, Russia could actually be the target of a military assault early next year.

There is a real threat of an attack on Russia. They are being prepared for it, Delyagin claimed. Things are hard enough for them in Ukraine to keep people in line. The only way is war.

According to the MP, the risk zone for invasion will be somewhere from early February to the end of March, and the Ukrainian troops could attack Crimea, as well as Rostov-on-Don, Belgorod, or Bryansk, three cities near the frontier.

However, according to Delyagin, Kiev does not actually want a war with Russia, but the leadership is being pushed into it very strongly by the West, and the country is now in a situation of absolute hopelessness.

Delyagin is a member of the opposition party Fair Russia - For Truth, and was elected earlier this year. In the early 1990s, he worked as an expert under Boris Yeltsin, the then-chairman of the Supreme Soviet, before Yeltsin was later elected as the first president of Russia.

Delyagin’s comments follow multiple claims from Western media outlets and politicians that Moscow has begun to concentrate troops on its border with Ukraine, with the view to launching an offensive in the near future. The Kremlin has repeatedly stated that it has no plans to attack, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has suggested Ukraine is more likely to ramp up the conflict.

Last month, Lavrov suggested that Moscow is not ruling out the possibility of Kiev conducting a military operation in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine.

Significant units and military equipment of NATO countries, including those of the US and the UK, are being deployed closer to our borders, he said. We simply have no way to exclude that Kiev’s regime will launch a military venture.

Last week, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Alexey Danilov, claimed that Russia has deployed 122,000 servicemen within a 200 kilometer distance from the border, with another 143,500 within a distance of 400 kilometers.