MOSCOW — Russia’s top diplomat on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time an official relationship with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, the same day that one of their top leaders made a surprise appearance in Moscow to whip up support for his cause.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that after Ukrainian leaders declined Moscow’s request in late May to allow Russian humanitarian aid into eastern Ukraine, Russia started to send it in anyway — via the pro-Russian separatist forces who earlier this month punched gaping holes into the border between eastern Ukraine and Russia.
“We are trying to provide humanitarian aid to those who have not left the conflict zone yet,” Lavrov told Lamberto Zannier, the secretary general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, at a meeting in Moscow. “We applied to the Ukrainian authorities with a request in late May for permission to deliver such aid. We were refused with an official note, so we are providing aid with the support of self-defense forces, who are worried about their fathers, mothers, wives and children.”
Lavrov did not give details, and a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry declined to comment. Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, the agency that typically coordinates humanitarian aid, said it was not involved in any efforts to help residents of eastern Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry said May 30 that eastern Ukrainians had requested “humanitarian aid, primarily medicine.”