BERLIN, December 17. /TASS/. German Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office Tobias Lindner of the Greens party has arrived to Kiev, where he is set to hold negotiations on security issues.

"I am making my first foreign visit today - at troubled times - to Kiev. First of all, I will have negotiations on security policy issues," the official said in a Twitter post late on Thursday.

According to Spiegel, Lindner was sent to Kiev by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock "as a signal of solidarity" with the government of Ukraine.

Ahead of the visit, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin Andrei Melnik said in a Twitter post that Kiev was expecting "practical aid, including military one" from Germany. So far, the German government has rejected the idea of supplying weapons to Ukraine for fears of escalation in the eastern region of Donbass.

There has been a flurry of statements in the West and Kiev lately that Russia could invade Ukraine. Peskov said they were unsubstantiated escalation and that Russia doesn’t threaten anyone. At the same time, he didn’t rule out provocations to corroborate these Western statements and warned that the use of force to resolve the crisis in southeastern Ukraine will have serious consequences. The Kremlin spokesman also assured that Russia was making every effort to help Ukraine resolve the conflict in Donbass in line with the Normandy format and the Minsk agreements.