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The United Nations Security Council is holding an emergency meeting Monday night at Ukraine’s request over the Russian government’s recognition of two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine and its order to deploy Russian troops to them — moves that could presage war.

The meeting, which started at 9 p.m. Eastern time, was publicly backed by the United States and other Western powers opposed to Russia’s actions. The American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said in a statement that “every U.N. member state has a stake in what comes next.”

“Russia’s actions threaten the international order that, since World War II, has stood for the principle that one country cannot unilaterally redraw another country’s borders,” she said in the statement.

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.

Nicolas de Rivière, the French ambassador, told reporters as he walked into the meeting that Russia’s actions violated international law.

“We need a diplomatic solution,” he said. “For the time being, we need to condemn what has been decided today.”

Russia, which holds the presidency of the 15-nation Security Council for the month of February, had no immediate comment on the meeting. But as a veto-wielding permanent member, it can block any action at the meeting that other Council members may propose.

The request for the meeting was announced hours earlier by the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba. Ukraine is not a member of the Council.

The request came as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recognized the two breakaway enclaves in eastern Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk, which could help lay the groundwork for Russian military forces to pour into Ukrainian territory. If Mr. Putin decides to invade Ukraine, it could set off one of the biggest conflicts in Europe since World War II.

“I officially requested UNSC member states to immediately hold consultations under article 6 of the Budapest memorandum to discuss urgent actions aimed at de-escalation, as well as practical steps to guarantee the security of Ukraine,” Mr. Kuleba wrote in a Twitter post.

The Budapest Memorandum refers to a 1994 agreement under which Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, former republics of the collapsed Soviet Union, gave up their stockpiles of Russian nuclear weapons from the Cold War era and joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in exchange for security guarantees. The efficacy of the agreement has long been called into question, however. Ukraine and Western nations have said Russia grossly violated the agreement in 2014 by seizing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Mr. Guterres’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, told journalists earlier on Monday that the United Nations was allowing for the “temporary relocation” of some nonessential staff and dependents in Ukraine, where the organization has about 1,500 employees, mostly of Ukrainian nationality, and nearly 1,200 dependents. Of the employees, he said, roughly 100 are in the two eastern breakaway regions.