Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has asked for a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Moscow’s troop buildup across the border and escalating tensions in eastern Ukraine, but the request has not been answered, a spokeswoman said on Monday.
The concentration of Russian troops along the frontier comes amid a surge of ceasefire breaches in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces have been locked in a conflict since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
More than 14,000 people have died in fighting in eastern Ukraine and efforts to negotiate a political settlement have stalled.
Photo: AFP
“The Kremlin, of course, has the request to talk to Vladimir Putin. We haven’t received a response so far and very much hope that it’s not a refusal of dialogue,” Zelenskiy’s spokeswoman Iuliia Mendel said.
The request was lodged on March 26, when four Ukrainian troops were killed in a mortar attack in the east of Ukraine, she said.
However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday said that he had not seen any requests from Zelenskiy “in recent days.”
Western and Ukrainian officials have raised concerns about increasingly frequent ceasefire breaches in the conflict area. Reports of Ukrainian military casualties have been occurring daily over the past week, while the rebels have also reported losses.
Ukraine’s military on Monday reported one more troop killed, bringing the total to 28 this year.
The G7 foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US on Monday said that they were deeply concerned by the large ongoing buildup of Russian military forces “on Ukraine’s borders and in illegally-annexed Crimea.”
They said the large scale troop movements are threatening and destabilizing, urging Russia “to cease its provocations.”
Zelenskiy is expected to head to Paris soon for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, Mendel said.
She said that Russia has accumulated 41,000 troops at its border with eastern Ukraine and 42,000 more in Crimea. The numbers are likely to grow, as the troops “keep arriving,” she said.
During a telephone call with Putin last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the removal of Russian troop reinforcements “to achieve a de-escalation of the situation.”
Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert on Monday said Germany has been following the Russian military buildup along the border with Ukraine very closely, adding that it has been “of great concern to us.”
The Kremlin has maintained that Russia is free to deploy its troops wherever it wants in its territory and has repeatedly accused the Ukrainian military of “provocative actions” along the line of control in the east and of having plans to retake control of the rebel regions by force.
Kremlin officials say that Kiev’s actions have threatened Russia’s security, warning that Russia could intervene to protect Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine.
Speaking on a trip to Egypt on Monday, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov said that “the current regime in Kiev might resort to reckless actions in an attempt to restore its [popularity] ratings.”
Amid the rising tensions, the US has notified Turkey that two of its warships are to arrive in the Black Sea today and tomorrow, and stay there until May 4 and May 5.
Russia has bristled at Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO, and its increasing military cooperation with the US and its allies.
Lavrov said that while Russia was moving troops in its own territory, “a question what the US ships and servicemen taking part in NATO activities in Ukraine are doing thousands of kilometers away from its territory has remained unanswered.”
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS