Troop pullback and a front-line invitation: April 2021

What did Moscow's announced pullback and Kyiv's offer of a meeting amount to on 26 April 2021? The days before that date had brought two public signals in the confrontation over Ukraine's border.

On 21 April 2021, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invited his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to a face-to-face meeting on the front line in the war-torn Donbas. The aim, he said in the invitation, was to negotiate an end to the conflict.

The next day, 22 April 2021, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that its forces would begin moving away from the Ukrainian border the following day. Ukraine and its western allies had accused Russia of trying to provoke conflict by sending troops to the border. Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu had maintained that the deployment was only to conduct drills.

The two announcements, a day apart, framed the situation as 26 April 2021 began: an invitation to talks on one side and a declared withdrawal of troops on the other, set against competing accounts of why the forces had been there at all.