"In short, the deal is a bitter pill for Mr. Poroshenko. But he was right to accept it, and Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande were right to press it... What remains incontrovertible is that Ukraine is Mr. Putin’s war. Mr. Putin has been offered a far better deal than he deserves. Now it is imperative for the West to keep his feet to the fire..." - Making the Ukraine Cease-Fire Stick - NYT Editorial | "For now, the situation on the ground in Ukraine is paramount. If the cease-fire fails to gain traction in implementation, then a wider deterioration of the conflict may come into play." - Russia is Winner in Minsk Talks | "It's difficult. He is playing a dishonest and dirty game," says Poroshenko. "I know, I know, and everybody knew that," replies his interlocutor, Lukashenko. Poroshenko adds: "He plays that game everywhere"... For once, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is a bit-player in the drama. He seems in a good mood through the night, though he gives little away. "We've been invited to eat salo," he says at one point, jovially referring to salted pig's fat, a staple of traditional Ukrainian cuisine... "Hollande and Merkel were often in the role of listening, facilitators," a French delegation source said. "For Poroshenko and Ukrainians it was more painful, given the situation on the ground, although Putin and Poroshenko do not have a hostile relationship," the source said. - To Reach Ukraine Accord: High Diplomacy,' Dirty Games' and Pig's Fat - NYT
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A “glimmer of hope” but “no illusion” was the inauspicious way Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, described the Ukraine cease-fire she and President François Hollande of France brokered in talks in Minsk, Belarus, with Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine. Ms. Merkel certainly deserves a lot of credit for her determined shuttling among Kiev, Moscow, Munich, Washington and Minsk in the urgent search for a resolution of the biggest security crisis to confront Europe since the end of the Cold War.
The last cease-fire negotiated in Minsk, in September, quickly unraveled, and the new one is very limited, leaving hard problems to be settled in coming weeks and months. And in the end, it is still for Mr. Putin to decide whether this is to be a real step toward peace or just another cynical feint in his campaign to dismember Ukraine.
Mr. Putin won a lot in Minsk. The fact that the cease-fire is to start on Sunday — and not immediately, as the Ukrainians wanted — gives the Ukrainian separatists a couple more days to press their siege on Debaltseve, a key rail hub where thousands of Ukrainian troops are surrounded, and in their attack on the Black Sea port of Mariupol. If the cease-fire does take hold, which is far from certain, both sides are to pull their heavy weapons out of range of each other. Then the deal requires both sides to withdraw “foreign” fighters and equipment, though Mr. Putin has never acknowledged the obvious presence of Russian forces and weapons in eastern Ukraine.
On the political side, the agreement says Ukraine can recover full control over its border with Russia by the end of 2015, after local elections in rebel-held areas and constitutional changes that would give these areas considerable autonomy. The degree of self-rule for pro-Russian regions of eastern Ukraine is at the core of any sustainable settlement, but the negotiations will take place while Russia remains free to move men and equipment over the border.
In short, the deal is a bitter pill for Mr. Poroshenko. But he was right to accept it, and Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande were right to press it. The conflict has already taken 5,400 lives and has displaced hundreds of thousands, and it has ravaged Ukraine’s most industrialized regions.
Ukraine, moreover, is an economic mess, with inflation running at about 30 percent and the currency in sharp decline. Coinciding with the conclusion of the Minsk negotiations, the International Monetary Fund announced it would grant a new lifeline to Ukraine. But to get the money, Ukraine needs to start carrying out internal reforms, and for that, it needs a respite from conflict.
Russia, too, finds itself in tough economic straits as a result of economic sanctions and the fall in oil prices. Mr. Putin finds himself increasingly ostracized in the West and potentially facing not only more sanctions but a Ukraine armed with lethal Western weaponry. One reason Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande may have embarked on their peace mission last week, apart from increased fighting in Ukraine, was a growing clamor in the United States Congress to send lethal arms to Ukraine. That would be an irresponsible and dangerous move in the current situation, but it added urgency to the Europeans’ mission.
What remains incontrovertible is that Ukraine is Mr. Putin’s war. Mr. Putin has been offered a far better deal than he deserves. Now it is imperative for the West to keep his feet to the fire; there should be no easing of sanctions until he demonstrates a willingness to live by the agreements reached in Minsk. And if he does not, there should be no doubt of more sanctions.
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ARTEMIVSK, Ukraine — Government forces trapped in a strategic railway hub in eastern Ukrainecame under heavy assault on Friday as Russian-backed rebel fighters sought to exploit the window ahead of a weekend cease-fire.
Artillery shelling and gunfire reverberated in the area around the railway hub, Debaltseve, just south of this front-line town of Artemivsk, where rebel troops reportedly severed the last land route into town, leaving government forces surrounded. At least 18 people were reported to have died.
In a hospital courtyard here, ambulance crews hurriedly wheeled about bloodied, freshly wounded soldiers.
Medical helicopters buzzed in and out through the day. At a school, teachers herded children indoors when the booms of artillery started rattling windows.
The escalation came a day after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany negotiated a new cease-fire agreement, the second in the nearly year-old war. The new pact left many issues unresolved, and many diplomats consider it fragile.
Still, it is considered the best hope of resolving the conflict, which has left more than 5,000 people dead and raised tensions between Russia and the West to their highest since the Cold War era.
But rather than the hoped-for calm, the cease-fire appeared instead to cause a sharp escalation.
The agreement provided for a two-day lag between the signing on Thursday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and the implementation here in eastern Ukraine at midnight on Saturday. Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, said it was a concession to the Russian-backed militants and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
A frantic, bloody last-minute land grab ensued, with the government-held town of Debaltseve a focus of the fighting. Debaltseve lies about halfway between Donetsk and Luhansk, the two redoubts of pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine.
After the overnight talks, Mr. Putin said Mr. Poroshenko refused to acknowledge that the separatist forces had surrounded up to 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers in Debaltseve, but the Russian leader said he hoped that consultations between military commanders would settle that matter.
The agreement requires that Ukraine and the rebels observe a cease-fire starting at midnight on Saturday, then withdraw heavy weapons from the front line within two weeks. Later, Ukraine must restore pensions and public sector wage payments to separatists areas and amend its Constitution to allow for greater local autonomy. If these provisions are fulfilled, Russia is to return control over a section of the eastern Ukrainian border by the end of this year.
“What we have on the table today gives us great hope,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who helped lead the mediation effort in Minsk.
“There is a real chance to turn things around toward the better,” she said, but added, “we have no illusions.”
On Friday, a Ukrainian military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said 11 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 40 wounded in fighting after the cease-fire agreement and in the first day of the window before its implementation. Mr. Lysenko said separatists had fired artillery at more than 30 towns and villages in the east.
In a sign the Ukrainian army, too, was trying to land blows before midnight Saturday, three children were reported wounded by artillery in the rebel-held town of Horlivka.
Some of the most intense fighting broke out along a tenuous, 31-mile Ukrainian supply route into the town of Debaltseve within hours of the signing.
Soldiers and medical crews interviewed here say rebels now control the road, and as evidence pointed to the ambulances and resupply trucks blown up by mines that now pepper a stretch of the route.
“I don’t know what happened,” Alla G. Neschadym, a nurse at the Artemivsk Central Regional Hospital, said in an interview about the battle that she said began in the late afternoon Thursday. “But I saw the results. The wounded came in all night long.”
The casualties flowed in from positions along the road. Soldiers were wounded by shrapnel from mortars and rockets, from gunfire and in explosions when their vehicles hit mines.
In one explosion, one soldier suffered damage to both eyes and “will probably be blind,” Ms. Neschadym said.
From Jan. 6 until Feb. 11, she said, the hospital treated 1,004 wounded soldiers, or about 46 per day, while overnight Thursday to Friday after the cease-fire signing, doctors treated 97 wounded soldiers in a frantic, bloody scene. By Friday, most of the wounded had been evacuated further from the front, but a stack of bloody stretchers remained in the hospital hallway.
In Moscow, the office of Mr. Putin endorsed the cease-fire, while trying to distance the Kremlin from enforcing it.
Dmitry S. Peskov, the spokesman for Mr. Putin, said that signing the cease-fire plan made Russia one of its guarantors, but repeated the standard Kremlin position that it could not affect developments on the ground.
“Russia is not a party which implements this set of measures,” Mr. Peskov was quoted as saying by RIA-Novosti, a state-run news agency. “We simply cannot do this physically, because Russia is not a participant in this conflict.”
Russia has long sought to portray the war in Ukraine as a purely internal matter, despite repeated sightings of both its soldiers and arms there. It is also clearly influential. Ms. Merkel said the rebel leaders at first had balked at signing the new cease-fire agreement in Minsk on Thursday, but had relented under pressure from Mr. Putin.
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MINSK — The talks lasted more than 17 hours, during which a couple of "buckets" of coffee were drunk, and took place in what Ukraine's foreign minister, with some understatement, described as a "difficult psychological atmosphere".
The 'family photograph' of participants at the start of the four-power marathon in the Belarussian capital Minsk told much of the story in advance: Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko stood at one end of the line-up - with the leaders of Germany and France keeping him well apart from Russia's Vladimir Putin.
The drily-worded declaration at the end of the Ukraine peace summit concealed the drama of an overnight diplomatic roller-coaster. Nerves were stretched to breaking point in negotiations which all sides agreed were often close to collapse.
With a small army of about 500 journalists monitoring their every move, participants ferried backwards and forwards from negotiations throughout the long night in Minsk's cavernous Palace of Independence, Poroshenko often visibly deep in thought.
Delegates, sometimes running at full tilt, dashed with documents into conference rooms. Outside one room, journalists could see delegates unfurling maps of Ukraine for examination.
Poroshenko would often step away to a room set aside for him to call for a battlefield update from his military chiefs, aides said.
He and Putin shook hands at the start of talks on Wednesday evening, squaring off like prize-fighters sizing up for a world contest.
As the night went into Thursday morning, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande increasingly took on the role of facilitators, shuttling from room to room between the two.
By the end, after what Putin drily observed was "not one of the best nights of my life", the Kremlin leader was visibly avoiding the Ukrainian leader, reporters said, seeking out Merkel and Hollande's company instead.
In a parting shot to Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, overheard by reporters as he prepared to leave for home, Poroshenko refers to a Russian 'dirty game'.
Putin himself said at the end that it was "not one of the best nights in my life, but the morning is good because, despite all the complexities of the talks process, we managed to agree on the main thing".
"Nobody slept. There were difficult times, tough times, in different formats to try to loosen the knots," a French delegation source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
"It would take place in a circular manner between different groups depending on the situation. Merkel and Hollande would see Poroshenko and Putin occasionally with delegations, from time to time in a small room next door," the source said.
A by-product of the encounter was the rehabilitation - for a while at least - of Belarussian leader Lukashenko, who is a pariah in the West because of his hard-line policies at home. He was once described by the United States as Europe's 'last dictator'.
He seized the opportunity to project himself as a peace broker as host to Western leaders after years of being shunned by them.
The following are snapshots from Reuters correspondents covering the talks which provide an insight into their dynamics:
- Poroshenko from the start acts like a man in a hurry. An aide said he rushed late onto the Antonov taking him from Kiev to Minsk. Once on board, he says: "Come on let's get off! We're running late!"
- Lukashenko presents Merkel with a small bouquet of flowers when she arrives with Hollande. This is the first visit by any Western leader to Belarus for years. They are all smiles when they say farewell 17 hours later.
- A press scrum that forms around Poroshenko when he arrives at the venue brings a human touch from the Ukrainian leader. He helps to his feet a cameraman who is knocked over as security staff push back journalists, saying: "Please excuse me."
- As talks start, delegates can be seen outside the negotiations pulling out wall-maps of Ukraine. One appears to say to the other: "No, not that one. The other one."
- In the early hours, Merkel and Hollande apparently bring Poroshenko and Putin back on speaking terms. They are seen piling into a lift, rushing, an aide said, to find Putin. They return to see Poroshenko and Putin later joins them.
- "A battle of nerves is under way," a top Poroshenko aide, Valery Chaly, writes on Facebook at about 4 a.m.
- Waitresses shuttle in and out of the negotiating chambers, pushing trolleys groaning with salads and fruit and bottles of water. Lukashenko, proudly proclaiming Belarussian hospitality says: "We ate fried eggs, cheese, dairy products and drank a couple of buckets of coffee."
- Poroshenko frequently flits in and out of a side-room to get an update from his military commanders. On one occasion, he comes out seemingly angered. Asked if an agreement will be signed, he says through clenched teeth: "Let's see."
- At about midnight, the Ukrainian press get a clear signal the talks have collapsed. They are told to pack to leave and wait at the entrance, where a bus is waiting to take them to an urgent briefing by Poroshenko. After about half-an-hour, they are told to return to the conference area.
- Journalists try to piece bits of conversation overheard from leaders when they emerge into the public area at the end of talks. "It's difficult. He is playing a dishonest and dirty game," says Poroshenko. "I know, I know, and everybody knew that," replies his interlocutor, Lukashenko. Poroshenko adds: "He plays that game everywhere."
- For once, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is a bit-player in the drama. He seems in a good mood through the night, though he gives little away. "We've been invited to eat salo," he says at one point, jovially referring to salted pig's fat, a staple of traditional Ukrainian cuisine.
- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, in a comment echoed by other delegations, tells parliament in Kiev on Friday: "On several occasions, there was a wish by us and by our friends to break off these negotiations."
- "Hollande and Merkel were often in the role of listening, facilitators," a French delegation source said. "For Poroshenko and Ukrainians it was more painful, given the situation on the ground, although Putin and Poroshenko do not have a hostile relationship," the source said.
(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau, Vladimir Soldatkin, Pavel Polityuk; Writing By Richard Balmforth; editing by Janet McBride)
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By William Tucker
Chief Correspondent, In Homeland Security
Chief Correspondent, In Homeland Security
After 17 hours of negotiations between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany, a cease-fire agreement affecting the Ukrainian conflict was reached Thursday.
The cease-fire is scheduled for one minute after midnight Sunday, March 15, 2015; however there is no guarantee that the cease-fire will actually occur. The last cease-fire, crafted in September of last year, never really took hold—and with many of the same provisions present in the current cease-fire—there is a very real chance of failure.
Germany’s Chancellor Merkel and France’s President Hollande acknowledged that there is much work to be done despite the agreement. Indeed, the cease-fire details specific actions regarding combat in eastern Ukraine, such as removing heavy artillery, but the belligerents are still in the area and the political turmoil underlying the conflict isn’t any closer to being resolved.
Further damaging to Ukraine is the provision that calls for constitutional changes that would accommodate the separatist regions politically. Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, stated that this doesn’t equate to autonomy, but it is a key Russian demand and its inclusion in the agreement is likely to keep the conflict unresolved. In essence, Ukraine has already lost territory to Russia and is now being forced to concede more political sway to Russia over territory within Ukrainian borders. How Kiev will deal with this is unknown, but demanding that a nation relinquish territory because of foreign aggression is not something that should be taken lightly.
Not only does Russia gain more political influence in Ukraine, it also may see some sanctions relief. If the cease-fire is implemented and takes hold, then it is conceivable that the European Union may not renew the sanctions on Moscow.
In addition to declining oil revenue, the Western-imposed sanctions on Russia have impacted the Russian economy, and though the EU may want to lift the sanctions, there is no guarantee that the U.S. will follow suit. Currently, the sanctions question is up in the air but that could change when they are up for renewal Feb. 16. If it so desires, Moscow could extensively push the issue next week when the decision is announced.
The EU is still dealing with a financial crisis, and the change of government in Greece has put further pressure on Germany to resolve the economic problems that have plagued Europe for the last seven years. Ending negotiations with Russia over Ukraine is something that Berlin and Paris would welcome—even if it means an imperfect solution.
Russia may have come out on top in this most recent round of negotiations, but it isn’t immune from international economic woes or even instability beyond its near abroad. With this in mind, it makes sense that the heads of state of these respective nations found it necessary to attend to talks in Minsk. Even though the cease-fire is less than ideal, a total breakdown in negotiations could potentially be much worse.
For now, the situation on the ground in Ukraine is paramount. If the cease-fire fails to gain traction in implementation, then a wider deterioration of the conflict may come into play.
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