Russian army kills 5 'saboteurs' from Ukraine on Russian territory

The Russian military said Monday that it had killed five "saboteurs" who crossed from Ukrainian territory, the latest claim fuelling tensions along Moscow's border with Ukraine.

"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.

Ukraine firmly denied Russian claims that Russian forces had killed five Ukrainian "saboteurs" who allegedly crossed the border to stage an attack, heightening fears of an all-out war, AFP reported.


"Not a single one of our soldiers has crossed the border with the Russian Federation, and not a single one has been killed today," Anton Gerashchenko, an official at Ukraine's interior ministry, told reporters

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)