The Russian parliament on Tuesday voted to urge President Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of Ukraine’s separatist regions amid tensions with the West over Moscow’s troop build-up.
The speaker of the Russian parliament’s lower house, Vyacheslav Volodin, said that lawmakers had decided to call on Putin to recognize two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as “sovereign and independent states”.
“Kyiv is not observing the Minsk agreements,” Volodin said on messaging app Telegram, referring to a Western-brokered peace deal.
“Our citizens and compatriots living in Donbass need help and support,” he said, referring to eastern Ukraine.
Russia has issued passports to hundreds of thousands of residents of separatist-held eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv troops have been battling an insurgency in a conflict that has claimed more than 14,000 lives since 2014.
The recognition of Ukraine’s separatist-held regions as independent would be a violation of the Western-backed agreements.
Speaking just ahead of the vote, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not say if the Kremlin would support the move.
“I cannot answer this question. You know that no official decisions have been made on this matter, there are no official discussions,” Peskov said.
At the same time he added: “The people’s representatives reflect the opinion of the people.”
“We treat this with understanding,” he said.
In Kyiv, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned that if Russia moved to recognise the rebel territories as independent “Russia de facto and de jure will withdraw from the Minsk agreements with all the attendant consequences”.
“We have already warned our partners about this position,” he said, speaking ahead of the vote in Moscow.
The call from the State Duma came amid an intense diplomatic effort to avert a feared Russian invasion of its pro-Western neighbour, possibly this week, and after Moscow amassed more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders.
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