Putin urges Kyiv to extend truce, 4 monitors freed
KYIV Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday joined the leaders of Germany and France in calling on Ukraine to extend its temporary ceasefire with pro-Kremlin militias beyond Monday, the Kremlin said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande joined Putin in asking Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko to extend the truce “for a longer period,” the Kremlin said in a statement issued after a four-way teleconference lasting more than two hours.
Hollande and Merkel spoke for more than two hours by telephone on Sunday with Putin and Poroshenko, seeking progress before a Ukraine ceasefire expires, the French president’s office said.
They “stressed the importance of further concrete progress towards the stabilisation of security on the ground, the extension of the ceasefire and the implementation of the peace plan presented by the Ukrainian authorities,” Hollande’s office said in a statement.
Ukraine extended its truce by 72 hours until Monday night, coinciding with a deadline set by European Union leaders on Friday for pro-Russian rebels to agree ceasefire verification arrangements, return border checkpoints to Kyiv authorities, free hostages and launch serious talks on implementing Poroshenko’s peace plan.
The ceasefire appeared under threat when three members of the Ukrainian military were killed in a rebel attack on their post near the eastern city of Slaviansk.
The call also comes after pro-Kremlin rebels in eastern Ukraine on Saturday released four monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) — one woman and three men — after being pressed by Putin to meet the terms of the tenuous truce with Kyiv. The separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine on Saturday released the second group of four monitors from the OSCE who had been seized on May 29, a witness said.
The OSCE observers looked tired but relieved as they were handed over by heavily-armed rebels to one of the group’s representative at a hotel in the eastern hub city of Donetsk.
“We are releasing the last four observers who were being held on the territory of the Lugansk People’s Republic,” the prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said. “We consider that we have fulfilled all our obligations,” Oleksandr Borodai said.
The Vienna-based organisation said the second team includes nationals from Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Russia.
“We welcome the return of the last four of the missing OSCE special monitoring teammates after a month away,” deputy mission head in Ukraine, Mark Etherington, said.
“The detention of OSCE monitors has substantially constrained the operations of the mission in eastern Ukraine at a time when a flow of objective information has never been more important.”
Germany also commented on the release of the OSCE team, expressing relief and stressing the need to maintain the ceasefire.
The extended ceasefire “is a positive sign but it is only the start of a process,” said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
“The weapons must be silenced in a lasting way to give negotiations a chance of succeeding,” he said.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern campaign said on Saturday that the past day of fighting had seen three soldiers killed and six others wounded outside the rebel stronghold city of Slavyansk. “Everyone knows that a bad peace is better than a good war,” Defence Minister Mykhailo Koval told Ukraine’s UNIAN news agency.