PARIS, February 1. /TASS/. A meeting between Presidents Emmanuel Macron of France and Vladimir Putin of Russia is possible but there are no dates yet, French cabinet spokesman Gabriel Attal told the France Info radio station.
"I don’t rule it out but no decisions have been made yet," he said in response to a question about a possible meeting between the two leaders in the near future. "However, I can say that the president will do everything to ensure de-escalation," Attal added.
He pointed out that the leaders of France and Russia had recently held two telephone calls. According to him, during the first conversation, Macron asked Putin if he was ready to work towards easing tensions in eastern Ukraine and the Russian President answered in the affirmative.
The West and Ukraine have recently been echoing allegations about Russia’s potential aggression in Donbass, where a domestic armed conflict between Kiev and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics has been raging since 2014. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov castigated these claims as "empty and unfounded", serving as a ploy to escalate tensions, pointing out that Russia did not pose any threat whatsoever to anyone.