Ukraine

Ukraine has decried the lack of progress in NATO's "open-door" policy to Ukrainian membership and said it could not comprehend why it wasn't invited to the bloc's summit next month.

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits Kyiv this week and meets with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he will seek to demonstrate strong Western support for Ukraine from the external threat of Russian aggression. Behind the scenes, however, there could be tension between the two over what Blinken often calls Ukraine’s “internal threat”: corruption and weak institutions.

After a period of relative calm, the seven-year-old conflict in eastern Ukraine is heating up again. On the Russian side of the border, recent mass deployments of troops and weapons, now ended, led to fears that Moscow was considering further military aggression against Kyiv. The EU and its Western partners have expressed concern about escalating tensions, and affirmed their strong support for Ukraine

Russia announced on Thursday it was ordering troops back to base from the area near the border with Ukraine, apparently calling an end to a buildup of tens of thousands of soldiers that had alarmed the West.

President Zelenskiy has invited Putin to meet him in eastern Ukraine for talks on ending the long-running conflict there. Kyiv has accused Russia of a massive troop buildup at the border.

The European Union says roughly 150,000 Russian troops are massed along the border of Ukraine and in Crimea — calling it the highest such military deployment. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described Russia's military buildup on the Ukraine border and annexed Crimea as very worrying.

US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke by phone late on Wednesday. Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said that the two leaders agreed that it was necessary to call on Russia to reduce the latest troop reinforcements near the border to Ukraine, "in order to achieve a deescalation of

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin have discussed concerns as tensions increase between pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian forces.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on NATO on Tuesday to lay out a path for Ukraine to join the Western military alliance, after days in which Russia has massed troops near the conflict-hit Donbas region. Zelenskiy’s comments drew an immediate rebuke from Moscow, which said Kyiv’s approach to NATO could further inflame the situation in Donbas, where violence has increased in recent days.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has warned of a “systemic aggravation” of the security situation in the country’s east and the Crimean Peninsula amid a recent spike of violence in the yearslong conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists.