The Kremlin, despite the military and financial aid it provides to the secessionist rebels, does not stop repeating that the conflict “is an internal problem” in Kiev
Amid tensions over the concentration of Russian troops on the border, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has once again raised the need to meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to reach an agreement to end the latent conflict in the two separatist republics of eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk (Donbass). He announced it this Wednesday before the deputies of the Rada (Parliament) during his annual message on the internal and external situation of the country.
“We must tell the truth, we cannot stop the war without direct negotiations with Russia.” However, the Kremlin, despite the military and financial aid it provides to the secessionist rebels in Donbass, does not stop repeating that the conflict “is an internal problem” of Ukraine and “Russia is not involved or a party to the conflict.” , but one more mediator within the framework of the Normandy Quartet (Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine).
It is not the first time that Zelensky summons Putin to sit down and talk. But the response from Moscow has so far been negative. In April, the Russian prime minister said that “if what the Ukrainian president wants is to discuss the problems of Donbass, then he should first meet with the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics.” He assured that he was willing to receive Zelenski to address only the bilateral relations between the two countries.
Moscow and Kiev have been accusing each other for weeks of stirring up tension in Donbass by sending troops to the area by both sides. Zelensky, the EU, the US and NATO deplore that Russia is preparing its forces to attack Ukraine while Putin and his ally, the Belarusian, Alexander Lukashenko, assure that the Ukrainian Army is preparing to recapture Donbass by force in violation of the agreements peace of Minsk of 2015.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who this Thursday will meet in Stockholm with his US counterpart, Antony Blinken, precisely to talk about Ukraine, said on Wednesday that “the United States, NATO and Western countries incite in all possible ways to the Ukrainian authorities to use force in Donbass ”. Lavrov said he hoped that “Zelensky will not follow the path of Mikhail Saakashvili – former Georgian president – when he attacked South Ossetia in August 2008.”
Then Russia sent its troops to the aid of the Ossetians, whose proclamation of independence it subsequently recognized. Moscow converted South Ossetia and Abkhazia into protectorates.
According to the head of Russian Diplomacy, “in the line of contact with Donbass, Ukraine is accumulating more and more forces and means with the growing support of Western instructors”. Its spokesperson, Maria Zajárova, specified that Kiev has concentrated some 125,000 soldiers there, “half of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, deployed very close to the border with Russia.”
Washington, however, believes that Moscow’s account only seeks to justify a military intervention against Ukraine. The Alliance also considers it that way. During a press conference this Wednesday in Latvia, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed that “we must be aware that it is not acceptable for Russia to demand the right to have its area of influence, to seek to obtain the power to control what your neighbors do. It is a world to which we do not want to return, in which the great powers had the right to put limits on the sovereignty of other countries.
For his part, the Belarusian dictator assured in an interview with the RIA-Nóvosti agency that, in the event of a war, “we will be with Russia side by side” against Ukraine. “I will never be with those Ukrainian nationalists,” he added. In this context, Lukashenko launched a request to Putin to return to Belarus the nuclear weapons that he had emplaced in Soviet times and that he had to deliver after the disintegration of the USSR.
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