Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, said that he was ready for talks with separatist leaders and European officials on Saturday.
“Ukraine has proposed a place and time for the meeting and is waiting the other party's confirmation,” Mr Poroshenko’s office said on Friday.
The offer came two days after Ukraine and Russia agreed the outlines of a peace deal that would bring an end to the violence in Ukraine.
At a summit in Berlin on Wednesday, the country’s foreign ministers agreed to seek a bilateral ceasefire monitored by the OSCE.
In a gesture of goodwill, Russia agreed to help Ukraine secure its borders once a ceasefire is in place.
A contact group led by former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma is due to convene talks with rebel leaders in Donetsk on Saturday.
Mr Poroshenko has said any such agreement would be conditional on rebels also going on ceasefire and releasing their prisoners, and on the Ukrainian border being secured by the OSCE.
In the meantime, he scrapped a week-long unilateral ceasefire and ordered an all-out offensive after a tentative truce failed to take hold on the ground.
Announcing the end of the ceasefire on Monday, he said the rebels had chosen war rather than peace, and said he would switch to his “plan B” - the use of force.
The resulting Ukrainian offensive using artillery, airstrikes and heavy armour may have turned the tide in the three-month long civil war raging in the country’s east.
But it has also resulted in multiple civilian casualties.
Several civilians were killed on Thursday after an air strike on a village in the Luhansk region, while rebels have said indiscriminate artillery fire has landed in civilian areas across the region.
Fighters loyal to the Donetsk People’s Republic, the separatist movement seeking unification with Russia, have held the town since April, defying repeated Ukrainian attempts to retake it.
In a disarmingly frank interview with Russian media on Friday, a visibly shaken Mr Girkin described the situation as desperate, and all but accused Russia of abandoning the rebels.
“My soldiers are dying everyday,” Mr Girkin, a Russian citizen and veteran of the Chechen wars who is known amongst the rebels as Igor Strelkov, said in an emotional interview with pro-Kremlin tabloid Life News.
“[The fighters] are people who consciously took up arms to defend their language and their culture, to defend Russia,” he said.
“[But] Russia does not want to help them unify with their people.”
“It is very difficult to accept that in nearly three months in Slavyansk practically no real help has reached us,” he added, drawing a distinction between assistance via “private channels” and the intervention by the Russian state that “we really need.”
Slavyansk, a city of 100,000 people north of Donetsk, has been the epicentre of a counter-revolutionary uprising seeking unification with Russia since gunmen seized the town’s police station and security service buildings on April 12.
While it soon came under siege from Ukrainian forces, rebels defied early attempts to retake the town, effectively turning it into a citadel of the insurgency.
But Ukrainian forces appear to have launched a heavy offensive in the past few days, subjecting the city to a relentless artillery barrage that rebels say has indiscriminately targeted civilian areas.
While many have fled in the past several weeks, Mr Girkin claimed about 30,000 local residents remain in the city.
Russia has condemned the Ukrainian offensive, accusing the Ukrainians of killing 20 people, including two children, and using cluster munitions in civilian areas.
The Russian foreign ministry also accused the United States and Britain of encouraging the use of force.
“It is noteworthy that the Ukrainian government’s harsh rhetoric and activation of force came on July 3, after president Poroshenko spoke with Joe Biden and Ukraine’s foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, spoke with British foreign minister William Hague,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.
The ministry struck back at British suggestions that Russian is supplying weapons to the rebels, accusing Mr Hague of “shameless” and “unfounded” accusations.
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