Tanks move during the Union Courage-2022 Russia-Belarus military exercise at the Obuz-Lesnovsky training ground in Belarus on Saturday.
Highlight
- Ukrainian president calls on Putin to call meeting to end crisis
- Ukraine will continue to follow only diplomatic path for peaceful solution
- Reports say there was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, facing a sharp escalation of violence in and around the region by Russia-backed rebels and sternly warning about plans to invade Russia, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday to meet him and demanded a solution to the crisis.
“I don’t know what the President of the Russian Federation wants, so I am proposing a meeting,” Zelensky said at the Munich Security Conference, where he also met US Vice President Kamala Harris. Zelinsky said that Russia can choose the place for the talks.
“Ukraine will continue to follow only the diplomatic route to a peaceful solution.”
There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin.
Zelensky spoke hours after separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine ordered a full military mobilization on Saturday, while Western leaders issued an increasingly dire warning that a Russian offensive on its neighbor appeared imminent.
In new signs of fear that war could begin within days, Germany and Austria asked their citizens to leave Ukraine. German air carrier Lufthansa canceled flights to the capital, Kiev and Odessa, a Black Sea port that could be a key target in an invasion.
NATO’s liaison office in Kiev said it was relocating staff to Brussels and the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Meanwhile, top Ukrainian military officials were fired upon during a visit to the front of the nearly eight-year-old separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.
According to an Associated Press journalist who was on tour, officers fled to a bomb shelter before fleeing the area.
Violence in eastern Ukraine has intensified in recent days as Ukraine and the two rebel-held territories accuse each other of escalating tensions. Russia said on Saturday that at least two shells fired from a government part of eastern Ukraine landed across the border, but Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba dismissed that claim as “a fake statement”.
Sporadic violence has broken out for years along the line separating Ukrainian forces from the Russian-backed rebels, but recent shelling and bombing may have triggered a full-scale war.
The United States and several European countries have accused for months that Russia, which has moved some 150,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, is trying to make up excuses to invade.
“They are tied to each other and are now ready to attack,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a visit to Lithuania on Saturday.
Harris began his meeting with Zelensky by saying that the world was at “a defining moment in history”.
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