The West needs to keep talking to Russia to make it more difficult for Moscow to launch an attack on Ukraine, Latvia said on Friday, as two days of increased shelling in eastern Ukraine sparked fears a Russian invasion could be imminent.
Diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis must continue, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics told Reuters on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, a three-day gathering of world leaders that looks set to be dominated by the tensions with Russia.
"While there are diplomatic efforts going on, it is actually very difficult for Russia to invade (Ukraine) or to do any kind of provocation," Rinkevics said.
Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian rebels on Friday reported increased shelling in eastern Ukraine for a second straight day, an escalation that Washington and other Western allies say could form part of a Russian pretext to invade.
According to Rinkevics, there are no signs yet that Russia is actually pulling down some of the more than 100,000 troops it has massed on Ukraine's borders, as Moscow had pledged earlier in the week.
"We should be really cautious. While we are not seeing the evidence of troops leaving we should presume that actually they are staying," he told Reuters.
Rinkevics urged NATO to base troops permanently in the Baltic states should Russia invade Ukraine, giving up the alliance's current principle of deploying troops there on a rotational basis only.
"Then I think Russia itself has decided to abandon the NATO Russia founding act (which bans the deployment of major combat units to NATO's eastern flank), and then, yes indeed, I do believe that these troops need to stay for an indefinite period of time or as they sometimes say: permanently," he said.
(Reporting by Andreas Rinke, writing by Sabine Siebold; editing by David Evans)
