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Ukraine's president visits Donbass as tension mounts with Russia
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he was visiting eastern Ukraine on Thursday, following a rise in tension with Russia over a long-running conflict.
www.reuters.com
4/8/21
KYIV (Reuters) - President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he was visiting eastern Ukraine on Thursday, following a rise in tension with Russia over a long-running conflict. Kyiv has raised the alarm over a buildup of Russian forces near the border between Ukraine and Russia, and over a rise in violence along the line of contact separating Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbass region. Russia says the troop movements are defensive and a senior Russian official has said Moscow has no plans to intervene in the conflict in eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. “As the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, I want to be with our soldiers in the tough times in #Donbas. Going to the locations of the escalation,” Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, told Reuters that the president wanted to “directly assess the situation on the spot.” Another Ukrainian serviceman were killed in shelling by separatist forces on Thursday morning, bringing the number of deaths to five in the past three days, the Ukrainian military said. “R.I.P. to the 23-year-old soldier who was shot last night. Ukraine needs peace and will do everything for this,” Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter.
One has to ask what the OSCE monitors are doing in Donbas and if they are investigating shelling and deaths.
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) has a penchant to elevate diplomacy over unpleasant facts. Both Ukraine and Russia are OSCE members.