KYIV (UKRAINE) : Russia’s military said it destroyed two Ukrainian armored vehicles and killed five Ukrainian personnel inside Russian territory Monday, but offered no evidence of the alleged incursion, as Ukrainian and Western leaders warned Moscow was seeking pretexts to mount an attack.

       Ukrainian military spokesman Lt. Col. Pavlo Kovalchuk said no such incident occurred. “It never existed," he said. Another Ukrainian official said it reminded him of the alleged shelling of Soviet forces by Finland in Mainila, something that turned out to be a made-up attack that triggered the Soviet invasion of that nation in 1939.

       Kyiv says it isn’t carrying out any offensive operations now that some 190,000 Russian troops have massed on Ukraine’s borders and that its forces have been holding back on returning fire to avoid giving Moscow any excuse for an invasion.

       “Russia, stop your fake-producing factory now," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted on Monday.

       Also on Monday, a Russian-installed leader of a breakaway part of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region asserted—also without offering evidence—that Kyiv had launched an offensive and said he would welcome financial and military assistance from Moscow.

       Shelling all along the cease-fire line separating Ukrainian-controlled parts of Donbas from those held by Russian-installed administrations has escalated in recent days amid U.S. warnings of an imminent Russian invasion. On Monday, a major power station in the Ukrainian-controlled town of Shchastia stopped operations because of damage sustained from Russian artillery, according to local officials.

       While Russia has aided and armed the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk since the Donbas conflict erupted in 2014, it has long insisted that its own armed forces aren’t directly involved in the fighting—which has claimed roughly 14,000 lives—an assertion ridiculed by Kyiv and the West.

       If Moscow openly enters the fighting in Donbas, its overwhelming advantage in aviation and missiles could allow its forces to punch through Ukrainian defenses and potentially encircle some of the Ukrainian army’s best fighting units.

       “Military assistance is needed, in different directions," Eduard Basurin, one of the leaders of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Russian TV on Monday.

       Russia hasn’t officially commented on this request. President Vladimir Putin is holding on Monday an emergency session of the country’s Security Council, according to the Kremlin.

       The developments in Donbas came hours after Mr. Putin agreed after talks with French leader Emmanuel Macron to continue diplomatic negotiations over Ukraine, including a possible meeting with President Biden, according to the Kremlin.

       Moscow wants Ukraine to implement the so-called Minsk-2 agreements, signed after Ukrainian forces were routed in Donbas in 2015. In the Kremlin’s interpretation of the deal, rejected by Ukraine, the agreement could give Russia’s proxies in Donbas a veto over Ukraine’s national affairs, halting the country’s alignment with the West.

       Russian-installed authorities in Donetsk said that several civilians and troops were killed and injured by Ukrainian fire Sunday, and released footage of a severed leg of what they said was a Ukrainian saboteur who had had an accident while trying to plant a bomb.

       They also said Ukrainian forces tried Monday morning to break through front lines along the Azov Sea coast, heading toward the Russian border. Ukraine dismissed these allegations as a disinformation campaign.

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       Russia on Monday also said a Ukrainian shell hit a border outpost in its southern Rostov region, destroying the building. Nobody was hurt in the incident, according to Moscow.

       Ukraine said its forces were far from that area, which abuts a part of Donbas controlled by Russia, and didn’t fire in that direction.

       “They are in search of a casus belli," said Ukraine’s national security adviser, Oleksii Danilov. “But the desire of the Russian federation to provoke us to begin active operations will fail."

       Lt. Col. Kovalchuk said Russian-backed forces were deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure on their own territory to escalate hostilities.

       “Our positions and the Russian border are separated by the temporarily occupied territories, and our artillery is currently drawn back to the rear of our positions," he said. “It would be absolutely impossible for us to shoot over the temporarily occupied territories to shoot all the way to Rostov."

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