(...) President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
(...) Before the invasion, the U.S. asserted that Russia intended to stage a false flag attack against members of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population as a justification for war and that the plans included a video featuring fake corpses. The video never materialized; Russia has consistently claimed it was invading to protect ethnic Russians from “Nazis" in Ukraine. (...) A former U.S. official said administration officials believe the strategy delayed Putin’s invasion from the first week of January to after the Olympics and that the delay bought the U.S. valuable time to get allies on the same page in terms of the level of the Russian threat and how to respond.
(...) Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said. (...) The European official described the disclosure as “a public game to prevent any military support from China.”
(...) In 2014, days before Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Russia released a recording of an apparent phone conversation between senior U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland and the ambassador to Ukraine at the time, in which Nuland disparaged the European Union. (...) The move was part of a wave of disinformation and propaganda from Moscow surrounding the seizure of Crimea. But the Obama administration didn’t react. (...) The Biden strategy has been different.