UKRAINE ON THE BRINK of Universal Conflict

UKRAINE ON THE BRINK - Can Russia & European Leaders Agree On Peace Talks?







More than five hours of talks at the Kremlin between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of France and Germany yielded no deal to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine. But the three agreed to continue diplomacy in hopes of clinching a long-awaited cease-fire within days.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande went to Moscow after violence flared anew in the region, and as Washington considers providing weapons to Kiev to try to counter further aggression by Russia-backed separatist rebels.

A spokesman for Ms. Merkel said she and the French president had a “constructive and substantial exchange of views with President Putin.”

None of the leaders commented publicly at the talks. Spokesmen for Ms. Merkel and Mr. Putin, in apparently coordinated phrasing, said afterward that the three had agreed to continue efforts to prepare a “possible joint document” on the implementation of agreements signed in September in Minsk, Belarus.

That peace plan never fully took effect, however; continued fighting killed more than 200 civilians last month alone, according to the U.N.

Ahead of the talks, Western diplomats said Mr. Putin had made a new offer to Paris and Berlin that departed substantially from the Minsk terms, giving the rebels more territory and greater autonomy in the wake of their recent battlefield gains.

In Brussels and other European capitals, the fear of Vladimir Putin is becoming palpable. The mood has changed in a matter of weeks from one of handwringing impotence over Ukraine to one of foreboding.

The anxiety is encapsulated in the sudden rush to Moscow by Angela Merkel and François Hollande. To senior figures closely involved in the diplomacy and policymaking over Ukraine, the Franco-German peace bid is less a hopeful sign of a breakthrough than an act of despair.

“There’s nothing new in their plan, just an attempt to stop a massacre,” said one senior official.

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish foreign minister, said a war between Russia and the west was now quite conceivable. A senior diplomat in Brussels, echoing the broad EU view, said arming the Ukrainians would mean war with Russia, a war that Putin would win. Eastern Ukraine has become a testing ground for Russia's new military capabilities.

A Russian television news network, Life News, claims the Ukrainian military is using NATO ordnance in eastern Ukraine. The report filed last week outside Horlivka, also known as Gorlovka in Russian, in the Donetsk Oblast shows a deputy brigade commander of the Donetsk People’s Republic with remains of a suspected M109 howitzer shell.


Ukraine’s armed forces could call up all female citizens of Ukraine aged between 20 and 50 to join the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the country’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladislav Seleznev, spokesperson for the armed forces’ high command told Ukrainian news agency Unian today. For nearly a year now, the U.S. has spurned calls to provide arms to Ukraine in its increasingly bloody conflict with Russian-backed separatists. “And since Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine — not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protests in the Maidan and [Ukraine's then-President Viktor] Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine,” Obama said in an interview. The State Department installed coup government in Ukraine may soon appoint a top financial kingpin to run its central bank.

The Azerbaijan Press Agency reports today George Soros is at the top of the list.

The information was released by Ukraine’s Channel 112, quoting sources in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, and people connected to former confectionary magnate and current president Petro Poroshenko. In November, Soros penned an op-ed for The New York Review of Books claiming central banks will renege on a pledge to fund the bankrupt country.


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