KYIV: Ukraine said Tuesday that its joint diplomatic efforts with Western allies have managed to deter a feared Russian invasion.
“We and our allies have managed to prevent Russia from any further escalation,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters (pic).
“It is already the middle of February, and you see that diplomacy is continuing to work.”
Kuleba’s comments came a day after Russia left the door open to more talks with the West to resolve a standoff triggered by Moscow’s opposition to NATO’s influence in eastern Europe and Ukraine’s ambition to one day join the alliance.
Russia’s defence ministry said Tuesday some of the more than 100,000 soldiers stationed near Ukraine’s borders were starting to return to base after completing military drills.
Ukrainian officials have spent weeks questioning US intelligence reports suggesting that Russia was readying an imminent attack on its western neighbour.
But Kuleba stressed that tensions remained high along Ukraine’s frontiers and that Russia still needed to pull back its remaining forces.
“We have a rule: don’t believe what you hear, believe what you see. When we see a withdrawal, we will believe in a de-escalation,” he said.
Russian parliament on Tuesday voted to urge President Vladimir Putin to recognise the independence of Ukraine’s separatist regions amid tensions with the West over Moscow’s troop build-up.
The speaker of Russian parliament’s lower house, Vyacheslav Volodin, wrote on social media that lawmakers had decided to call on Putin to recognise two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as “sovereign and independent states”.
The Kremlin said Tuesday the pullback of some Russian forces from Ukraine’s borders was planned but stressed Russia would continue to move troops across the country as it saw fit.
“We have always said that after the
exercises are over ... troops would return to their permanent bases. There’s nothing new here. This is a usual process,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Earlier Tuesday, Russia said it was pulling back some of its forces near the Ukrainian border to their bases, in what would be the first major step towards de-escalation in weeks of crisis with the West.
The move came amid an intense diplomatic effort to avert a feared Russian invasion of its pro-Western neighbour, possibly this week, and after Moscow amassed more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders.
Speaking with reporters Tuesday, Peskov rejected Western claims that Russia was planning to attack Ukraine.
“This is nothing but a totally unprecedented campaign to provoke tensions,” he said.
Peskov took particular issue with moves by a number of Western countries, including the United States and Canada, to relocate their embassies away from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
“This is some sort of ostentatious hysteria, which of course is not based on anything,” he said.
Instead of ramping up tensions, Russia and the West should discuss each other’s security concerns in earnest, he added.
“This is what President Putin is proposing. This is what President Putin wants,” Peskov said.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Putin he saw a “chance” to continue security talks with the West.
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