Talks on Ukraine collapse without progress
Peace talks on Ukraine collapsed after just over four hours yesterday with no tangible progress towards a new ceasefire.
Ukraine’s representative and separatist envoys both angrily accused each other of sabotaging the meeting.
Ukraine’s representative, former president Leonid Kuchma, left the talks in Minsk, Belarus, telling Interfax news agency that separatist officials had undermined the meeting by making ultimatums.
He said they refused “to discuss a plan of measures for a quick ceasefire and a pull-back of heavy weapons”.
Denis Pushilin, one of the separatist officials, told the Russian news agency RIA that they were ready for dialogue “but not ready for ultimatums from Kyiv while shelling by their forces is going on in the background of towns in the Donbass(industrialised eastern Ukraine)”.
The meeting of the “contact group”, which also involves a Russian envoy and an official from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, took place in Minsk even as fighting between Kyiv’s forces and the Russian-backed rebels raged on in Ukraine’s east, claiming more civilian and military lives.
The outcome dashed hopes that a new ceasefire could be put together soon to stem nine months of conflict pitting Ukrainian government forces against Russian-backed separatists who have declared “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine.
Shortly before the Minsk talks broke up, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a three-way phone call had expressed the hope the meeting would at least produce a ceasefire agreement.
More than 5,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last April following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in response to the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kyiv by street protests.
The conflict has produced the gravest crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War with the United States and the European Union imposing sanctions on Moscow because of what they say is incontrovertible proof that it is providing arms and men in support of the separatists.
Moscow denies this is so.
Mr Kuchma also reproached the two main separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine, who signed key agreements in Minsk last September, for failing to attend yesterday’s follow-up meeting of the “contact group”.
He said the Ukrainian government remained adamant that it wanted the separatists to honour agreements made in Minsk last September for a ceasefire as part of a 12-point blueprint for peace.
Much-violated from the start, that truce collapsed completely with a new rebel advance last week.
Interfax quoted him as saying he awaited to hear Russia’s reaction to the outcome soon.