Ukraine on Monday denied Kremlin’s allegations that its ”saboteurs” crossed into Russia to stage an attack.
“Not a single one of our soldiers has crossed the border with the Russian Federation, and not a single one has been killed today,” Anton Gerashchenko, an official at Ukraine’s interior ministry, told reporters.
Russia’s military said on Monday that troops and border guards had prevented a “diversionary reconnaissance” group from breaching Russia’s border from Ukrainian territory and that five people had been killed.
Ukraine rejected the report, calling it fake news, and said no Ukrainian forces were present in the Rostov region where the incident was alleged to have taken place.
Russia has massed an estimated 150,000 troops on three sides of Ukraine, the biggest such buildup since the Cold War.
Western officials have warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin is now merely looking for a pretext to invade the country, a western-looking democracy that has defied Moscow’s attempts to pull it back into its orbit.
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Moscow denies it has any plans to attack but wants Western guarantees that NATO won’t allow Ukraine and other former Soviet countries to join as members.
It has also demanded the alliance halt weapons deployments to Ukraine and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe — demands flatly rejected by the West.
Since last week shelling has spiked along the tense line of contact that separates Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland of Donbas.
Over 14,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted there in 2014, shortly after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
(With inputs from agencies)
