Moscow The Ukrainian government said on Monday that requests from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin over the escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine was ignored. Moscow has denied receiving any request from Kiev for such talks.
Tensions between neighbors have been steadily rising for several weeks, with escalating skirmishes in eastern Ukraine – a region that has been in conflict since Russia first supported Ukrainian separatists there seven years ago. Putin het thousands of forces sent recently to the Ukrainian border, which is causing concern among politicians in the United States and the European Union.
“The president’s office has, of course, made a request to speak with Vladimir Putin. We have not yet received a response and we hope that this is not a refusal of dialogue,” Ukrainian presidential spokesman Iuliia Mendel told reporters on Monday. Reuters said.
She told the Russian Interfax news agency that the request for talks was sent on March 26 after four Ukrainian military soldiers were shot dead in the east of the country.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters he had “not seen any requests for the past few days.”
Mendel said Russia had amassed more than 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, and more than 40,000 on Crimea, the region that had unilaterally annexed Putin from Ukraine and declared Russia in 2014.
Mendel said Zelenskyy would travel to Paris this week for talks on Russia’s actions and the escalating conflict in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, Reuters reported.
The current escalation also further hampers relations between America and Russia. Foreign Minister Antony Blinken has warned Russia against aggressive action, accusing Putin’s army of amassing more forces near the Ukrainian border than ever since 2014.
“President Biden was very clear about this: if Russia acts recklessly or aggressively, there will be costs, it will have consequences,” Blinken said during the interview over the weekend.
The Kremlin has said Russian and Ukrainian political advisers are arranging a possible new round of talks under the so-called Normandy format – a multilateral dialogue involving the leaders of France and Germany.
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday called on Moscow to state its intentions in the region, saying that if Putin’s government had “nothing to hide”, it could easily explain why troops were moving. word ‘.
Manfred Weber, a leading member of the European Parliament from Germany, calls the build – up of Russia’s troops a test for the West, and warns that Moscow must take new sanctions if the situation continues to escalate.
“The answer must be clear and tough,” he said.
Ukrainian presidential press office via AP
In an interview with CNN when he visited his troops on the front lines, Zelenskyy said Ukraine “needs more than words” from the support of Washington and other European allies facing Russia.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said that Russian military forces are free to move around within the country’s territory as they see fit, and that troop movements near the Ukrainian border – according to Moscow – pose no threat.
Last week, Putin accused Ukraine of ‘dangerous defiant actions’ in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Relations between Kyiv and Moscow have deteriorated since Putin first supported the separatists in the region and adopted Crimea in 2014. The Kremlin insists that support for the separatists is limited to political and humanitarian support, but the West has long accused Putin of sending military forces and hardware.
The seven-year conflict between the pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian government claimed more than 13,000 lives. On Sunday, the Ukrainian army reported another death – a soldier suspected to have been killed by artillery fire from Russian-backed fighters.
Over the weekend, Kremlin spokesman Peskov said no further peace talks could take place until conditions were met in the Minsk peace agreements. The Minsk agreements, reached during the 2015 talks in neighboring Belarus, put an end to the worst hostilities in Donbas, but the full agreement was never fully implemented.
Since then, peace talks have stalled, with Russia and Ukraine unable to find any new common ground.