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The confrontation coincides with a surge in violence in the war in Ukraine’s easternmost regions and torpedoed plans to revive talks between Russia and Ukraine in China next month, with Putin reversing earlier support to call negotiations “pointless.” It also caps a week in which the Russian leader met with the presidents of Turkey and Iran and spoke with India’s Narenda Modi, as well as U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, as he seeks to ease international isolation and he prepares for the G-20 summit of developed nations.

Interest on Ukraine’s dollar-denominated note maturing in 2019 jumped 42 basis points from a record low to to 7.891 per cent at 11:57 a.m. in Kiev. Russia’s ruble weakened 0.2 per cent against the dollar, while the Micex stock index fell 0.2 per cent, tracking the third day of declines in the price of crude oil.

Military and political analysts were perplexed by the timing of the flareup as it followed efforts by Putin to repair ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that frayed after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter on the Syrian border last year.

The Russian leader has exhibited a tendency to use instability in the region as leverage in negotiations and to embark on big foreign-policy and military campaigns both at times when he has the global spotlight — as he does with his operations in Syria now — and during Olympic games. He started the annexation of Crimea, for example, as Russia hosted the Sochi Olympics and sent troops into neighboring Georgia during the Beijing Games in 2008.