The world has been gripped for the past two months by the Ukraine crisis, with Moscow seemingly poised to invade Ukraine at any moment, and US officials calling for war — even nuclear strikes — in response. Washington has been flooding the former Soviet republic with weapons and other military aid ever since, with $200 million worth starting to arrive this week, and Democratic lawmakers are now scrambling to send another $500 million of military aid on top of that. It’s one of several measures meant to deter or, in the worst-case scenario, defend against a Russian invasion that’s been sold as “imminent” since the start of December.

With so much excitement happening, you’d be forgiven for missing the serious doubt that such an invasion is even going to happen. While politicians and media in the United States, UK, and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries have been hyping the prospect of war, officials inside of Ukraine — the country being potentially invaded — have been telling people a different story.

Just yesterday, the split led to a minor diplomatic rift after a phone call between Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which Kyiv signaled in advance it would use to ask Washington to tamp down the rhetoric. While what exactly was said remains a point of dispute, the substance is that Biden believes a Russian invasion could come in February, while Zelensky holds that it’s far from clear and that the Russian threat is “dangerous but ambiguous.”