The Kremlin warned Monday that there are no concrete plans for a summit between the leaders of Russia and the United States, as diplomats scramble to stave off the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The idea of a meeting between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden has been championed by France and cautiously welcomed by Ukraine as a way to avoid a catastrophic war in Europe.
But Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said: “It is premature to talk about specific plans to organize any kind of summits”, adding that “concrete plans” have not been put in place.
French President Emmanuel Macron called Putin on Sunday and later his office said both the Russian and Biden were open to the idea.
The summit would go ahead, however, only “on the condition that Russia does not invade Ukraine.”
“There is diplomatic hope,” French European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune told LCI television.
“If there is still an opportunity to avoid war, to avoid confrontation and to build a political and diplomatic solution, then we have to take it,” he said.
But in Washington, a senior US administration official told AFP: “The timing is yet to be determined. The format is to be determined. So it’s all completely fictitious.”
Visiting Brussels, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister welcomed the French effort.
“We believe that it is worth making every effort to achieve a diplomatic solution,” Dmytro Kuleba said before a meeting with his EU counterparts.
“We hope that the two presidents will leave the room with an agreement on the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine,” he said.
Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said there are no signs of Russian forces withdrawing from the border, and Moscow-backed rebels continue to bombard Ukrainian positions.
“Since the beginning of this day, until 09:00, 14 attacks have already been recorded, 13 of them with weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreements,” he told reporters in Kiev.
“One of our soldiers was injured,” he added.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and Moscow-backed separatists maintain an enclave in the eastern districts of Lugansk and Donetsk.
In recent weeks, according to US intelligence services, Moscow has concentrated more than 150,000 soldiers and sailors around Ukraine’s borders in Belarus, Russia, Crimea and the Black Sea.
Biden has said that US intelligence believes that Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine and that commanders are preparing units to attack within days.
Russia has long denied this, but its state media accuses Kiev of preparing a murderous assault on the rebel enclave, and has begun evacuating civilians from the area.
Kiev and Washington accuse the Russians of plotting a “false flag” operation to fake Ukrainian atrocities as a pretext for an all-out assault.
Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia continue to blame each other for increased shelling on the front line separating Kiev’s forces from Moscow-backed separatists.
The shelling has driven Ukrainians into cellars and other shelters, while some civilians have been evacuated.
The idea of a summit came moments after Macron held his second marathon call with Putin of the day on Sunday.
During their first 105-minute conversation, Putin blamed the rise in violence at the front on “provocations carried out by the Ukrainian security forces,” according to a Kremlin statement.
Putin repeated a call for “the United States and NATO to take Russian demands for security guarantees seriously.”
But Macron’s office also said the two had agreed “on the need to favor a diplomatic solution to the ongoing crisis and to do everything possible to achieve it.”
The second time the two spoke, late Sunday afternoon, it was for an hour, the French presidency said. The summit announcement came shortly after.
“Bombing Again”
In Zolote, a frontline town in the Lugansk region, an AFP reporter found residents hiding in a roughly furnished dirt-floored basement when the separatist conflict broke out in 2014.
“These weeks have begun to bomb with more force. Now they are shelling again,” said Oleksiy Kovalenko, a 33-year-old handyman.
In Moscow, the US embassy warned Americans of possible attacks on public places in Russia.
Fears of an escalation were heightened on Sunday when Belarus said Russian forces would remain on its soil after Sunday’s scheduled end to joint drills, a striking distance from Ukraine.
Moscow-backed separatists have accused Ukraine of planning an offensive in their enclave, despite Russia’s massive military deployment along the border.
Kiev and Western capitals ridicule this idea, accusing Moscow of trying to provoke Ukraine and of plotting to fabricate incidents to serve as a pretext for Russian intervention.
Rebel regions have made similar claims about Ukrainian forces and have ordered a general mobilization, evacuating civilians into neighboring Russian territory.
“My husband told me: take the children and go!” Anna Tikhonova, a 31-year-old nurse, told AFP from a camp in Veselo-Voznesenka, Russia.
She and her children had fled Gorlovka, Ukraine, upon hearing the gunshots, she said.