Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he is considering a request from pro-Russian separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine’s breakaway regions to recognize them as independent.
“The purpose of today’s meeting is to listen to colleagues and to determine our further steps in this direction, including the appeal from the leaders of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic to Russia seeking recognition of their sovereignty and the resolution of the state Duma on the same subject,” Putin told his security council, in comments aired on television.
More context: Even as Russian forces mass on Ukraine‘s border, the spotlight last week swung back to the rumbling low-intensity war in eastern Ukraine and its possible role in setting the stage for a broader conflict.
The Ukrainians say shelling by the Russian-backed separatists is at its highest in nearly three years, and for their part the separatists allege the use of heavy weapons by Ukrainian armed forces against civilian areas.
On Thursday, a kindergarten in Ukrainian-controlled territory less than 5 kilometers from the front line was hit. On Friday and Saturday, the Ukrainian authorities reported a further spike of shelling by heavy weaponry, which is banned from within 50 kilometers of the front lines by the Minsk Agreements.
Ukraine said it recorded more than 100 truce violations in the east, after a day of heavy weapons fire that saw fears of a Russian invasion mount.
The leaders of the two breakaway pro-Russian territories claimed the Ukrainians are planning a large military offensive in the area. On Friday they organized mass evacuations of civilians to Russia, while instructing men to remain and take up arms.
Ukrainian officials repeatedly deny any such plans.
About the recent history in Donbas: War broke out in 2014 after Russian-backed rebels seized government buildings in towns and cities across eastern Ukraine. Intense fighting left portions of the Donbas region’s eastern Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts in the hands of Russian-backed separatists. Russia also annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 in a move that sparked global condemnation.
The separatist-controlled areas in Donbas became known as the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The Ukrainian government in Kyiv asserts the two regions are in effect Russian-occupied. The self-declared republics are not recognized by any government, including Russia. The Ukrainian government refuses to talk directly with either separatist republic.
The Minsk II agreement of 2015 led to a shaky ceasefire agreement, and the conflict settled into static warfare along the Line of Contact that separates the Ukrainian government and separatist-controlled areas. The Minsk Agreements (named after the capital of Belarus where they were concluded) ban heavy weapons near the Line of Contact.
Read more about the separatist-held regions here.
CNN’s Tamara Qiblawi, Nathan Hodge and Ivana Kottasová contributed reporting to this post.