Competing mediation offers have showered down on Vladimir Putin, as his defence minister visits troops on the Ukraine border before unprecedented joint exercises with Belarus, due to start in a week’s time.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on a trip to Kyiv, offered to host talks between Ukraine and Russia. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, prepared a fourth phone call in a week with Putin, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was planning a trip to Moscow.
Russia confirmed it was possible that Scholz and Macron would travel to Moscow together, as a symbol of European unity and as joint signatories to the Minsk agreements, the stalled 2015 deal designed to bring peace and autonomy to Russian-supporting eastern Ukraine.
Macron is de facto becoming the chief interlocutor for the Russian president in Europe, coordinating closely with Washington and Warsaw.
The frenetic diplomatic activity on Thursday came as Russia accused the US of ratcheting up “tensions” by sending 1,000 soldiers to Romania and 2,000 to Poland to bolster Nato’s eastern flank. Moscow is refusing to pull back more than 100,000 troops from Ukraine’s borders, and said its security demands had not yet been addressed by Nato.
Erdoğan’s efforts to become the lead mediator are likely to be rejected by Moscow. Putin has been angered by Ankara’s decision to sell drones to Kyiv for use in eastern Ukraine, as well by a new offer to build a Turkish drone manufacturing plant in the country.
Turkey said that as a Nato member it was legitimate to provide weapons against a country that might threaten other Nato states in eastern Europe. “Military cooperation between Ankara and Kyiv is not intended to target Russia and won’t be disrupted in order to please it,” a senior Turkish presidential official said.
The Kremlin urged the US to “stop escalating tensions” after the deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, warned the “destructive” move would make it harder to reach a compromise between the two sides. The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, was in Belarus inspecting plans for a massive joint drill planned for between 10 and 20 February between Belarus and Russia
Putin has demanded guarantees that Ukraine will never join Nato, and that offensive missiles will be removed from states close to Russian borders. The Kremlin also claimed it had China’s support in the standoff, backing that would be demonstrated when Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday at the opening of the Olympics.
Alongside the frenetic diplomacy, Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, tried on Thursday to cool the temperature, saying that “the probability of a significant escalation as of today is considered low” as Kyiv had not seen Moscow move “strike groups” to the border.
In a change of language, responding to Ukrainian concerns, the White House said on Wednesday it would no longer refer to a Russian invasion of Ukraine as “imminent”, saying the word implied Putin had already made a decision to attack.
France also said its offer to send troops to Romania among wider plans to bolster Nato’s ranks on the eastern flank was designed to de-escalate the crisis rather than provoke Russia.
The French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, speaking alongside his Romanian counterpart, said: “I don’t think one can say this is a provocation, to respond to the commitments we have in the framework of Nato. The fundamental subject now is to defuse tensions as quickly as possible and to do that you dissuade and discuss.”
The Romanian foreign minister, Bogdan Aurescu, said: “It must be said very clearly, if you compare the allied presence on the eastern flank to the troops Russia has massed, it is several times smaller so there is no question of an attempt to escalate tensions.”
The two ministers were also meeting foreign ministers from the Baltic states and eastern Europe. Lithuania is pressing Germany as the Nato battlegroup leader to increase its troop commitments in the country. Germany currently has 550 soldiers stationed in Lithuania as part of the 1,200-strong battlegroup.
There are unresolved divisions within the EU, especially between Poland and Hungary, over the nature of the sanctions that would be imposed in the event of a Russian invasion, as well as how to protect European energy needs.
Le Drian, in a sign of Franco-German solidarity, is due to fly to the frontline in eastern Ukraine on Friday in the company of the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock.
