Mr Poroshenko, not empty-handedA COLUMN of men in camouflage snaked through the streets of Ternopil, a sleepy town in western Ukraine, with a casket held aloft earlier this week. Yuri Dinya, a solider who died from wounds sustained in eastern Ukraine, was the latest casualty of a war that sputters along largely out of sight. Although the violence has ebbed, following a peace deal signed in Minsk last year, not one part of the peace plan has been implemented. A meeting on March 3rd between the foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France ended in exasperation.
Yet the skirmishes and negotiations continue not because both sides seek to control Ukraine’s Donbas region, but because neither wants to assume responsibility for it. Russia has made clear that it does not plan to annex it, and would rather use it to destabilise Ukraine from within. Ukraine’s leaders, while formally committed to taking back the territory, also recognise the problems they would inherit. The Minsk agreement is a “big fat status quo that doesn’t satisfy anyone, but that we can’t get out of,” says Balazs Jarabik of the Carnegie...Continue reading
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