Russia-Ukraine Live Updates: Moscow Orders Troops to Breakaway Regions

The United States and allied nations denounced Russia on Monday at an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting over the Ukraine crisis, calling Moscow’s recognition of two separatist regions and the deployment of Russian troops to them a blunt defiance of international law that risks war.

The unusual late-evening meeting of the Council, requested by Ukraine, quickly turned into a diplomatic rebuke of Russia and the actions announced earlier Monday by President Vladimir V. Putin.

“Russia’s clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unprovoked,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American U.N. ambassador, told fellow diplomats. Ridiculing Mr. Putin’s assertion that Russian forces had been deployed as peacekeepers, she said: “This is nonsense. We know what they really are.”

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said Mr. Putin was “testing our international system, he is testing our resolve and seeing how far he can push us all,” and she called his attempt to recreate the Russian empire an antiquated throwback.

“Putin wants the world to travel back in time. To a time before the United Nations. To a time when empires ruled the world,” she said. “But the rest of the world has moved forward. It is not 1919. It is 2022.”

The representatives of France and Britain issued similar denunciations. “Russia is choosing the path of confrontation,” said France’s ambassador, Nicolas de Rivière. Britain’s ambassador, Barbara Woodward, said: “Russia has brought us to the brink. We urge Russia to step back.”

Earlier Monday, Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations, who has said that he believed the crisis would be resolved without military force, sharply criticized the Russian actions.

“The secretary general considers the decision of the Russian Federation to be a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and inconsistent with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” Mr. Guterres said in a statement.

Even China, which often sides with Russia in disputes at the Security Council, offered an unusually terse comment that suggested some unease with the Russian actions over Ukraine. Ambassador Zhang Jun said “all parties concerned must exercise restraint and avoid any actions that may fuel tensions.”

Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia of Russia, who is president of the council for February and was obliged to schedule the meeting, categorically rejected any criticism, an indication that diplomacy over the crisis was going nowhere.

He framed his country’s actions as benevolent help to the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donetsk and Lukansk regions, known as the Donbas, which have been engaged in a low-level war with Ukraine since 2014. Mr. Nebenzia described them as victims of Ukrainian attacks and subterfuge that violate the Minsk Accords that were aimed at halting that conflict.

“We remain open to diplomacy,” Mr. Nebenzia said. “However, allowing a new bloodbath in Donbas is something we’re not prepared to do.”

He said the…