Eurasia Press & News
Foreign ministers from France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia were meeting on Monday in Berlin to try and resolve tensions threatening to scupper a planned summit on ending the Ukrainian conflict.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko hopes that a presidential summit of the four countries can take place on Thursday in Kazakhstan with the goal of signing a peace document with Russia.
The deal would commit Ukraine and Russia to implement fully a peace accord already signed in September but which pro-Russian separatist guerrillas and Ukrainian forces have violated repeatedly in a war that has already killed more than 4 700 people.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel informed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Poroshenko over the weekend that the peace summit was pointless as long as a truce was not respected. France, which is the other major European broker in Ukraine peace negotiations, expressed similar reservations.
Officials meet in Berlin to discuss Ukraine peace
“We have not reached a point where we can say it is politically useful to have such a meeting,” German foreign ministry spokesperson Martin Schaefer said on Monday.
