MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th April, 2021) Ukraine should be getting more military support from the US, particularly Patriot anti-missile systems, amid the escalation of the conflict in the southeast (Donbas), head of Ukraine's Presidential Office Andriy Yermak told Time Magazine.
"Ukraine is holding the line against Russia, not just for us, but for the West," Yermak said in the interview, published on Monday, adding "And where does the U.S. deploy its Patriot Missiles? The closest ones are in Poland. They should be here."
Last week, the first deputy head of the ministry of information of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), Daniil Bessonov, said Kiev continued to pull military equipment to Donbas for a potential offensive it may launch in late April.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Ukraine does not reject the idea of a military solution to the problem of Donbas, and in that case no country, including Russia, would remain silent.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Time Magazine on April 9 that Moscow was carrying out "a kind of test" to see how strong Western support for Kiev is.
"We are not claiming that there will be a real escalation [in southeastern Ukraine]. It might simply not be in anyone's interests to have one," Zelenskyy said, claiming that Russia wants to "raise the temperature just enough to show that the West will waver in its support for Ukraine, that they do not really see us as a partner."
According to Peskov, the current situation in Donbas is very unstable and "in general, creates the danger of a resumption of full-scale hostilities."
Earlier this month, Yermak said that Zelenskyy would soon hold talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Ukrainian media also reported, citing presidential spokeswoman Iuliia Mendel, that Zelenskyy had requested talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the Donbas escalation. The Kremlin said on Monday that it had not received such requests in the past few days.
The Normandy Four format , which includes Russia, France, Germany, and Ukraine, was established in June 2014 to mediate the conflict in southeastern Ukraine, after the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, known together as Donbas, proclaimed independence following what they considered to be a coup in Kiev in February of that year. Kiev launched a special military operation against the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DPR and LPR) in 2014.
In 2015, the Normandy Four negotiated the so-called Minsk II protocol which stipulated a ceasefire in Donbas and sought a long-term political resolution to the conflict. During a Normandy summit in Paris in late 2019, all sides agreed that the Minsk agreements remained the basis of Donbas conflict resolution.
Despite the Minsk peace agreements, ceasefire violations continue in southeastern Ukraine. According to UN data, about 13,000 people have fallen victim to the Donbas conflict.
On April 2, a four-year-old boy was killed and his 66-year-old grandmother was injured in what locals and the DPR said was an attack of a Ukrainian strike drone.
The Russian Investigative Committee has opened multiple criminal cases against the Ukrainian security forces over the shelling of Donbas in recent days.
