Ukraine’s president put his army on combat alert Thursday along the country’s de-facto borders with Crimea and separatist rebels in the east as a war of words between Russian Federation and Ukraine threatened to heat up the largely frozen conflict over the Black Sea peninsula.
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Ukraine for its part has denied all of Russia’s claims, which come just weeks ahead of the first nationwide parliamentary elections that Crimea will be able to take part in after its 2014 annexation.
Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, right, and Oleksandr Turchynov, Head of Ukraine’s Defence and Security Council, chair the Council extraordinary session in Kiev, Ukraine.
“We call for the avoidance of any actions that would escalate the situation there”, Trudeau said at a briefing on Thursday.
The strong language used by Putin and other Russian officials, particularly Putin’s refusal to discuss the implementation of the peace accord with Poroshenko, has raised fears of a possible escalation of hostilities.
Russian Federation was also considering tightening security at the land and sea borders with Ukraine.
Ukrainian U.N. Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko warned that Russian Federation had amassed more than 40,000 troops in the region and said the build-up could reflect “very bad intentions”.
A peace plan for the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, negotiated in Minsk between Ukraine and Russian Federation by Germany and France some 18-month ago, has stalled for months.
Oleh Slobodyan, a spokesman for the Ukrainian border guards, said Russian Federation had massed troops on Ukraine’s border with Crimea in recent days.
Peace talks in the Belarusian capital of Minsk in 2015 helped ease the fighting in eastern Ukraine but did not solve the crisis.
Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst in Ukraine, said: “Putin will scare the West with the prospect of full-scale conflict with Ukraine. Will Russia break away from it or will it demand new concessions?” the newspaper wrote.
Pro-Russian separatists are fighting the Kiev government’s forces in the eastern Ukraine region despite a fragile ceasefire.
“Putin won’t go all out for a big war. But we believe now it’s the time to reduce the tensions, to reduce the rhetoric and get back to talks”.
US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt said Washington had so far seen nothing to corroborate Russia’s version.
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Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vladimir Yelchenko, called Putin’s statement “dangerous”.
