From BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60436938" Russia has been accused of trying to stage a fake crisis in a breakaway eastern region of Ukraine to give it a reason to launch an invasion.
Russian-backed rebel leaders in Donbas announced an evacuation of residents, saying Ukraine had intensified shelling and was planning an attack.
Ukraine has denied planning an offensive, saying Russia was spreading disinformation.
There is no sign of any mass movement of people leaving the region.
It comes as US President Joe Biden said he was "convinced" that Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine, and expected it to happen in the coming days. But he added that "until he does, diplomacy is always a possibility".
Moscow, which has massed troops on Ukraine's borders, denies it is planning an invasion.
Leaders of the Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk issued their evacuation orders on Friday, telling women, children and the elderly to relocate to Russia, claiming that Ukrainian troops were planning to attack their territories.
Hundreds of thousands of people live in the region, and such evacuation would be a huge undertaking. There is no indication that a mass evacuation is imminent, but Russian state media did report that several buses carrying local residents had made their way to Russia.
Denis Pushilin, head of the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), said Russia had agreed to provide accommodation for people leaving the region, and that women, children and the elderly should be evacuated first.
He announced the evacuation in a video purported to have been filmed on Friday. However, the BBC checked the metadata, which shows it was recorded two days ago - before the flare-up in hostilities.
The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had ordered that refugee camps be set up near the border and "emergency" aid paid to people arriving from the separatist areas.
Ukraine has repeatedly said it is not planning any attack, and seeks to regain control over the rebel-held areas using only diplomatic means. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Friday dismissed what he described as "Russian disinformation reports".
Russia has been backing a bloody armed rebellion in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region since 2014. Some 14,000 people - including many civilians - have died in fighting since then.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said events over the past 48 hours were part of Russian efforts to create "false provocations" to justify further "aggression".
The US State Department later called the announcement of evacuations a "cynical" move by Moscow "to distract the world from the fact that Russia is building up its forces in preparation for an attack". And White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the evacuations were an example of Moscow using misinformation as a pretext for war.
On Friday night, Ukraine's military intelligence service said it had received information that explosives had been planted at infrastructure facilities in Donetsk in preparation for a so-called false flag attack - an attack carried out with the intention of blaming an opponent for it.
"These measures are designed to destabilise the situation in the temporarily occupied areas of our country and create a reason to accuse Ukraine of committing terrorist acts," the Ukrainian Defence Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate said on Twitter.
Earlier on Friday, separatist authorities said a parked jeep had been blown up near a government building in Donetsk. US and Ukrainian officials said it was a staged attack designed to stoke tensions.
Mr Putin, meanwhile, said the situation in eastern Ukraine was deteriorating.
At a news conference on Friday, the Russian president made unsubstantiated accusations of "mass and systematic violations of human rights" and enshrining in law "discrimination of the Russian speaking population" in Ukraine.
He told reporters that he remained willing to discuss the crisis in Ukraine with Western leaders, but accused them of ignoring Russia's security concerns, and warned that any deal must include a legally binding pledge that the Nato security alliance will stop its eastward expansion."
