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Putin accuses Ukraine of 'terror' over alleged Crimea raid
Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of practicing "terror” over an alleged border clashes that he said left two Russian servicemen dead, in the worst escalation of tensions between the two countries in months.
Russian security agencies said on Wednesday that two Russians were killed as they thwarted Ukrainian commando raids into Crimea over the weekend.
Ukrainian officials angrily denied any such incident had taken place and accused Mr Putin of seeking a pretext for war, in an exchange that raised fears of a renewal of the levels of confrontation that marked the annexation of Crimea and outbreak of war in east Ukraine in 2014.
"From the Russian side there were losses - two soldiers killed. We obviously will not let such things slide by," Mr Putin told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday afternoon.
"The attempt to provoke an uptick in violence, to provoke conflict is nothing but an attempt to distract public attention," he said.
He added that he saw no point in holding planned talks with Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine, at the G20 summit in China next month.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, which controls the country’s border guards, said one of its officers and one solider were killed in separate cross border incursions by Ukrainian forces on Sunday and Monday.
"Steps have been taken to destroy an agent network of the Chief Intelligence Department of the Ukrainian defence ministry in the Crimean peninsula," the agency said in a statement.
The agency said it had arrested three of the "raiders" and seven local Ukrainian and Russian citizens acting as "accomplices."
Ukraine immediately dismissed the report as a “provocation,” and accused Russia of looking for a “casus belli” to launch an all out war with the country.
"This is fake information," a Ukrainian military spokesman said.
"Putin wants more war. Russia escalates, desperately looks for casus belli against Ukraine, tests West's reaction," Dmytro Kuleba, a spokesman for Ukraine's foreign ministry, wrote on Twitter.
Mr Putin's government has since built up a large military presence on the peninsular, and is in the process of building a bridge across the Kerch strait to secure connections to the Russian mainland.
Crimea has been relatively unaffected by the on-going war between government forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, but tensions on the defacto border have grown in recent days.
Russian border guards briefly closed road crossings from Crimea to mainland Ukraine on Sunday.
On the same day, Crimean Tatar activists in the region reported seeing large numbers of military vehicles moving into the border towns of Dzhankoy and Armyansk.
The FSB said the agent who died was killed during an overnight operation on Saturday and Sunday, when officers smashed a “terrorist” group and seized an arms cache including 20 homemade explosive devices.
The agency claimed Ukrainian forces tried to “break through” twice more on Sunday night and Monday morning, killing a Russian soldier.
Renewed tensions around Crimea follow a surge of violence between government forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces fight nightly battles despite a nominal ceasefire.
Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed in combat on Monday, the country's defence ministry said.
Representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics have in turn accused Ukraine of shelling separatist positions with increasing intensity.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said he was “seriously concerned” about the spike of violence along the ceasefire line on Monday.