Russia wants to send a second humanitarian aid convoy to eastern Ukraine, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday, introducing a likely new topic of discord on the eve of crucial talks between the two countries' leaders.
Ukraine and its Western allies denounced the arrival of a first huge convoy that crossed the border last week without Kiev's permission. But Lavrov said more aid was needed to ease the plight of civilians caught up in four months of fighting between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military.
"The humanitarian situation is not improving but deteriorating," Lavrov told a news conference. "We want to reach an agreement on all conditions for delivering a second convoy by the same route... in the coming days."
He was speaking a day before talks in the Belarussian capital Minsk, where Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko will come face to face for the first time since early June.
The first convoy of more than 200 Russian trucks crossed into Ukraine last Friday, prompting the Ukrainian state security chief to denounce it as "a direct invasion". The trucks withdrew again at the weekend and Lavrov said the aid was now being distributed.
Ukraine and Western governments have repeatedly accused Russia of arming pro-Moscow separatists who took over parts of eastern Ukraine in April and are still holding out in the face of a steady advance by Ukrainian government forces.
Kiev accused Russia on Monday of trying to open up a second, southern front against its forces. It said Russian forces in the guise of separatist rebels had crossed into Ukrainian forces with armor.
Russia denies sending weapons and fighters into Ukraine, where more than 2,000 people have been killed in the fighting.
Lavrov said that in Tuesday's talks, where the European Union will be represented by its foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, the West should not put the onus on Moscow to come up with solutions.
Lavrov did not lay out any new Russian proposals but said Moscow wanted to see the implementation of previous agreements that he said had been ignored: a ceasefire without pre-conditions, and an 'all-national dialogue' between the Ukrainian government and all the country's regions.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian government forces engaged with a separatist armored column near the southeastern town of Novoazovsk, about 10 km (6 miles) from the Russian border, Ukraine's military information service said.
Border guards halted the advance of the column about 5 km northeast of the town, which is on the Azov Sea, it said in a Facebook post.
On another note, Germany condemned the public parading of Ukrainian government prisoners of war in separatist-held Donetsk on Sunday as quite likely a war crime, a spokesman for the foreign ministry in Berlin said on Monday.
"It's quite probable," Martin Schaefer told a government news conference when asked if that had been a war crime. "It is completely distasteful and it's just not done."
In Donetsk on Sunday about 100 people introduced over a public address system as Ukrainian prisoners-of-war were marched through the city's central Lenin Square.
REUTERS