Diplomacy rather than the noise of guns.
Ukraine ruled out on Friday April 9 any military offensive against pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, where deadly clashes have increased in recent weeks, against a backdrop of tensions with Russia.
"The forcible liberation of the temporarily occupied territories will inevitably lead to numerous civilian and military casualties, which is unacceptable to Ukraine," said the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Ruslan Khomtchak.
In a statement posted on Facebook, he stressed that Kiev supports a "political and diplomatic" solution to recover the territories that have eluded it since the start of this conflict, in 2014.
He also denounced as a disinformation campaign led by Russia "reports" saying that Kiev was preparing an offensive, while the Ukrainians accuse Moscow of massing its troops on its borders.
According to Ukraine, the Kremlin could be looking for a pretext to launch a major military operation.
"This campaign aims to discredit Ukraine on the international scene, to spread panic among the population of the occupied territories," General Khomtchak again declared.
Kiev and the West have in recent days criticized Moscow for having massed troops on the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Russia, while deadly armed incidents with pro-Russian separatists are almost daily.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was thus on Thursday and Friday at the front.
He also received the support of Angela Merkel who asked Vladimir Putin on Thursday to reduce his military presence at the borders of Ukraine.
13,000 dead since the start of the conflict
The United States said it was "increasingly concerned about the recent escalation of Russian attacks in eastern Ukraine".
They will also send two warships to the Black Sea via the Bosphorus Strait, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, a deployment likely to irritate Moscow in this context of tensions over Ukraine.
The separatists of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, for their part, reported the loss of at least twenty of their soldiers over the same period.
By comparison, Ukraine lost 50 troops in 2020 on the front line, according to the presidency.
The war in Donbass began in April 2014, in the wake of a pro-Western revolution in Ukraine that was also followed by Moscow's annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula.
This conflict has left more than 13,000 dead and nearly 1.5 million displaced.
The intensity of the fighting has largely declined after the Minsk peace accords reached in early 2015, but the political process is not moving forward.
For the West and Kiev, Russia's political, military and financial support for the separatists is obvious, despite repeated denials from Moscow.
With AFP
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