Officials meet in Berlin to discuss Ukraine peace

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.