Pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine postpone disputed elections
Hollande had said after talks that also included Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that he saw no way the February deal could conceivably be implemented by its end-of-year-deadline.
Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko and Russian lawmakers have already praised the move as a step toward peace.
Announcing the postponement, the representatives of the rebel regions said that the departure from the initial dates of the local elections is linked to “Kyiv’s complete implementation of Minsk-2’s political points”.
“Ukraine desperately needs support from overseas, so it doesn’t become a so-called failed state – this risk is unfortunately very great”, U.S. Archbishop Thomas Gullickson, who was nuncio in Kyiv from November 2011 until early September, told Vatican Radio October. 2.
Mr Poroshenko’s comments to a group of military cadets in Kyiv came one day after the separatists delayed, until next year, local elections they had planned for the coming weeks. In 80 days’ time, after the passage of the law, the election should be held.
Both Ukrainian and pro-Russian separatist forces are claiming they have begun to withdraw their weapons from the front line of the ongoing conflict in the eastern section of Ukraine.
This image taken in the village of Shyrokyne, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, on July 3, 2015, shows a Ukrainian sniper looking down the scope of his rifle.
“Today at 11.00 (9 a.m. BT) in Luhansk region we began a simultaneous removal of T-64 and T-72 tanks and in a few places anti-tank artillery D-48 and D-44 and… mortars”, military spokesman Ruslan Tkachuk said on Facebook.
The 18-month insurrection – the bloodiest in Europe since the Balkans crises of the 1990s – has killed more than 8,000 people and driven about 1.5 million from their homes.