Moscow – The Ukrainian government said on Monday that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s requests to speak with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin about the escalation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine had been ignored. Moscow denied receiving any requests from Kiev for such talks.
Tensions between neighbors have been steadily rising for several weeks, with intense skirmishes in eastern Ukraine, a region that has been embroiled in conflict since Russia backed Ukrainian separatists seven years ago. Putin has done it sent thousands of forces recently to the Ukrainian border, and raised concerns among U.S. and European Union politicians.
“The president’s office, of course, made a request to speak with Vladimir Putin. We have not yet received a response and we very much hope that this is not a refusal to dialogue,” a spokeswoman for Reuters told Reuters on Monday. Ukrainian presidency, Iuliia Mendel.
He told Russia’s Interfax news agency that the request for talks was sent on March 26 after four Ukrainian soldiers were killed in bombings in the east of the country.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters he “has not seen any petitions in recent days.”
Mendel said Russia had massed more than 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border and more than 40,000 in Crimea, the region Putin unilaterally annexed away from Ukraine and declared Russian in 2014.
Mendel said Zelenskyy will travel to Paris to talk this week about Russia’s actions and the escalation of the conflict in the Donbass region of Ukraine, Reuters reported.
The current escalation is also further straining relations between the United States and Russia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned Russia of aggressive action, accusing Putin’s military of gathering more forces near the Ukrainian border than at any time since 2014.
“President Biden has made it very clear: if Russia acts recklessly or aggressively, there will be costs, there will be consequences,” Blinken said in an interview over the weekend.
The Kremlin has said Russian and Ukrainian political advisers are working to organize a possible new round of talks under the so-called Normandy format, a multilateral dialogue that would involve the leaders of France and Germany.
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday called on Moscow to declare its intentions in the region, saying that if Putin’s government “has nothing to hide, it could easily explain why troops are moving.”
Manfred Weber, a prominent member of Germany’s European Parliament, described the build-up of Russian troops as evidence for the West and warned that if the situation continues to worsen, Moscow would face new sanctions.
“The answer has to be clear and hard,” he said.
Ukrainian Presidential Press Office through AP
In an interview with CNN when he visited his troops on the front line, Zelenskyy said Ukraine “needs more than words” of support from Washington and other European allies when facing Russia.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said that Russian military forces are free to move around the territory of the country as they see fit and that troop movements near the Ukrainian border (exercises, according to Moscow) pose no threat.
Last week, Putin accused Ukraine of “dangerous provocative actions” in the Ukrainian region of Donbas. Relations between Kiev and Moscow have deteriorated since Putin first supported separatists in the area and seized Crimea in 2014. The Kremlin insists its support for separatists is limited to political and humanitarian support. but the West has accused Putin of sending military forces and hardware.
The seven-year conflict between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian government has claimed more than 13,000 lives. On Sunday, the Ukrainian army denounced another death: a soldier allegedly killed by artillery fire from Russian-backed fighters.
Over the weekend, Kremlin spokesman Peskov said no more peace talks could be held before the conditions set out in the Minsk peace accords were met. The Minsk agreements, reached during the 2015 talks in neighboring Belarus, put an end to the worst of hostilities in Donbas, but the full agreement has never been fully implemented.
Since then, peace talks have stalled and Russia and Ukraine have found no new common ground.