Top US, Russia diplomats to hold talks on Ukraine

Published February 2, 2022 · Updated September 27, 2022

Members of Ukraine's Territorial Defence Forces line up for training in Kharkiv.

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Washington and Moscow’s top diplomats plan to talk by phone on the Ukraine crisis in another attempt at diplomacy.
The call between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, expected later on Tuesday, comes a day after a fractious United Nations Security Council meeting in New York.Washington’s ambassador to the council warned the situation in Europe is “urgent and dangerous”, while Moscow’s envoy accused the United States and its Western allies of “whipping up tensions”.
Russia has fuelled fears of war by massing more than 100,000 soldiers near the Ukraine border but says it has no plans to invade. Instead, it accuses NATO of undermining the region’s security and wants the alliance to withdraw from Eastern Europe and block Ukraine from membership.
The US and NATO have ruled out these demands. Here are all the latest updates:
The United Kingdom, Poland and Ukraine are preparing a trilateral pact to strengthen regional security, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmygal says.
“I hope that in the near future we will be able to officially launch a new regional format of cooperation … [and] in the context of ongoing Russian aggression, we should sign a trilateral document on cooperation to strengthen regional security,” Shmygal said while hosting his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki in Kyiv.
Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari, reporting from Moscow, says Russia is bemused by Western concerns over its troop buildup near Ukraine’s border given it staged military drills involving what the Kremlin claims were even larger numbers of servicemen last April.
“Russian officials say there was not this much concern at that time … so they believe that there is now rhetoric and false information coming from the US with the aim of trying to destabilise Russia’s relationship with Ukraine,” Jabbari said.
Kyiv said at the time that Russia had massed 120,000 soldiers near the Ukrainian border in April 2021, a concentration of forces that Kyiv’s Western allies claimed was larger than the one mobilised by Moscow when it seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.