“As a result of clashes, five people who violated the Russian border from a group of saboteurs were killed,” the military said in a statement, adding the incident occurred near the village of Mityakinskaya in the Rostov region at 06:00 am.
Amid rising tensions, the White House had proposed that President Joe Biden would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin but the Kremlin on Monday said that there were no concrete plans for a summit over Ukraine. The French president Emmanuel Macron had said the two leaders had agreed on a meeting in principle.
A summit might offer a path out of Europe’s biggest military crisis in decades, and European financial markets edged higher on the glimmer of hope for a diplomatic solution.
Both Washington and Moscow played down hopes of a breakthrough, and satellite imagery appeared to show Russian deployments closer to Ukraine’s border than before.
Western countries accuse Russia of planning to invade a neighbour that it had controlled for centuries until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Moscow denies planning any attack but has demanded sweeping security guarantees, including a promise that Ukraine will never join NATO.
(With agency inputs)
