UKRAINE hosted German Chancellor Angela Merkel today for talks ahead of official celebrations tomorrow marking 30 years since its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.

Ms Merkel travelled to Kiev from Moscow, where she held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Germany is seeking assurances that Russia will continue to pipe gas through Ukraine to the European Union. 

But the visit is seen in Kiev as an opportunity to highlight unity with the EU against Russia, with the Volodymyr Zelensky government calling a conference on the reconquest of Crimea ahead of tomorrow’s anniversary.

Ms Merkel said she hoped to revive the peace process in the Donbass, where a civil war provoked by 2014’s Maidan coup in Kiev has raged ever since, claiming over 14,000 lives.

But her commitment to work to assure the “territorial integrity of Ukraine” will be seen as support for Ukraine’s ongoing claim to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. 

A subsequent referendum in the majority ethnic-Russian territory voted for union with Russia, but this has not been recognised by many other countries. 

Ukraine will open the inaugural meeting of a new organisation on Monday, the Crimean Platform, which is aimed at raising pressure for reconquest of Crimea. 

Top of the agenda will be alleged persecution of Crimean Tartars, who make up about 15 per cent of the peninsula’s population. 

The Crimean Tartar Mejlis, a body affiliated to the Platform of European Memory and Conscience – an anti-communist body set up by the EU to promote historical narratives emphasising the “crimes of totalitarianism” – accuses Russia of moving more ethnic Russians into Crimea to alter its demographic make-up.

Leader Refat Chubarov said: “Moscow is continuing the policy of squeezing the Crimean Tartars.”

But Russia says Ukraine and its Western backers are sponsoring terrorist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organisation banned in Germany as well as Russia, in efforts to destabilise Crimea.

The Supreme Council of Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union on August 24 1991, despite Ukrainians having voted by more than 80 per cent to stay part of the multinational state in a March referendum that year.

The Communist Party of Ukraine said this week it would commemorate the events as “an anti-socialist coup ... with tragic consequences.”