French President Emmanuel Macron has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him assurances that Russian troops would not exacerbate the tensions at the country’s Ukrainian border.
According to the BBC, speaking to reporters, President Macron said that he had “secured an assurance that there would be no deterioration or escalation,” while referring to the developing crisis in Eastern Europe with Russia having amassed about 100,000 of its troops near the Ukrainian border in recent weeks.
Russia on its part has however maintained that any idea that there was a guarantee given was “not right”.
The French leader’s statement came just before he was set to meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday. President Macron was on a diplomatic tour to meet with leaders in the region in a bid to find a resolution to the crisis.
He reached Ukraine’s capital city Kyiv on Tuesday after holding a six-hour long deliberation with President Putin in Moscow on Monday.
In a press conference where the French and Ukrainian presidents were in attendance, President Macron said that there was an opportunity to advance negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and that he envisioned “concrete solutions” towards de-escalation.
President Macron, however, stressed that any resolution could take months, adding that there was a “shared determination” to enforce the Minsk agreement. He also repeated that the Russian president had told him that he would not cause any escalation.
Meanwhile, President Zelensky was expecting that Russia, France and Germany would negotiate soon in the future to reduce the conflict in eastern Ukraine. He also called on his Russian counterpart to take concrete action to de-escalate tensions.
Earlier during the Moscow meeting between President Macron and President Putin, the latter had deemed some progress was achieved in the talks. He hinted that some of President Macron’s proposals “could form the basis of further joint steps” but they were “probably still too early to talk about”.
Later, a French official while speaking to reporters, said that the French and Russian heads had agreed Russia would withdraw troops from Belarus after exercises near Ukraine’s northern border had ended.
The fact that there was a deal between the two leaders of this nature was categorically denied by the Kremlin spokesman Dmirty Peskov, although he conceded that the Russian forces would return at some point.
Eastern Europe has been in troubled waters after almost eight years since Russia supported a rebellion in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and took control of the Crimean peninsula.
Russia has alleged that the Ukrainian government has failed to enforce the Minsk agreement, which was brokered by Germany and France to restore peace in the east, where rebels backed by Russia have taken over large tracts of land. The conflict has resulted in the death of almost 14,000 since 2014.
In the latest tensions, the West including the US have feared that Russia was about to attack Ukraine, which Moscow has explicitly denied.
Russia has instead demanded that Ukraine be denied entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), withdrawal of the alliance’s troops from Eastern Europe and the removal of weaponry near Russian territory.
Both the US and NATO have denied fulfillment of these demands.
