The leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany spoke Thursday by phone in an apparent attempt to shore up a ceasefire deal shaken by Ukraine’s forced retreat from a key town after a separatist offensive.
Ukraine pulled its troops from Debaltseve, a strategic railroad hub, on Wednesday after fierce fighting with pro-Russian separatist forces.
A deal signed in Minsk, Belarus, by the four leaders — Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande, Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a week ago had called for a ceasefire starting Sunday, to be followed by a withdrawal by both sides of heavy weapons to create a buffer zone.
“In my telephone conversation with Merkel, Hollande and Putin I stressed that the situation around Debaltseve was in breach of Minsk accords,” Poroshenko tweeted Thursday.
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In a sign of the heightened tensions between Russia and other European nations, Britain’s Royal Air Force scrambled fighter jets Wednesday after Russian aircraft were identified flying close to UK airspace, the Ministry of Defence said Thursday.
“The Russian planes were escorted by the RAF until they were out of the UK area of interest. At no time did the Russian military aircraft cross into UK sovereign airspace,” a spokeswoman said.
UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper Wednesday that there’s a “real and present danger” that Putin would use murky tactics to destabilize the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which border Russia on NATO’s eastern flank.
CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh, Alla Eshchenko, Matthew Chance and Khushbu Shah contributed to this report, as did journalist Victoria Butenko in Kiev.
