BERLIN, Oct. 19 – Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia agreed on Wednesday to draft a road map within weeks to ease confrontation between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian separatist forces in Donbas.
The parties also agreed to give OSCE monitoring groups access to more territory in the conflict zone, potentially allowing them policing role and initial border control in the areas.
The road map will be discussed in more detail in the coming weeks, said the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, who met in their first summit meeting on the Ukraine crisis in more than a year.
“We now have a starting document, but it still has many points of discord,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, quoted by The Wall Street Journal. “This is certain still to be very arduous.”
Merkel and French President François Hollande met for more than four hours with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Officials had played down expectations ahead of the meeting, and Merkel said afterward that as predicted, the session had “worked no miracles.”
The road map will be based on the Minsk peace agreement of February 2015 as Russia and Ukraine continue to argue on which steps of the agreement must be implemented first.
Foreign ministers will work out details of the road map in November, Merkel said.
Poroshenko said the sides agreed during the five-hour meeting to withdraw Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed separatists from four new areas at the frontline of the fighting in the Donbas region. That follows the withdrawal of forces from three other key areas that began last month.
They also agreed that monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe could be armed and that their activities in monitoring the so-called Minsk peace process would not be impeded.
Local elections remained a matter of debate, with Ukraine insisting it would only hold elections in the Donbas region after foreign forces withdrew, Poroshenko told reporters.
Separatist violence erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and has killed 9,600 people so far. Both Russia and Ukraine accuse each other of perpetuating the violence and violating the 2015 Minsk peace agreement.
At Thursday's EU dinner, eastern and Baltic countries are also set to call for stronger EU defenses against what they say is Russian disinformation campaigns to destabilize their governments or a possible cyber attack.
"The mood is hardening," said a senior EU diplomat. "Russia used to be seen as a strategic partner. Now it is a strategic problem." (wsj/rt/ez)
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