Ukraine’s separatist leader suddenly announced on Tuesday a unilateral cease fire beginning at midnight Wednesday – a move that could potentially resolve the two-year-old conflict.
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More than 9,500 people have died in the two-year-old armed conflict between Russian-backed eastern separatists and Ukrainian government troops.
France and Germany helped broker the 18-month-old Minsk peace deal. However what had been a state of war seemed to morph into a low-grade conflict that nonetheless continued to claim lives on both sides.
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Warring sides were supposed to end hostilities by the end of previous year but lack of progress and continued fighting forced them to extend the Minsk Agreement through 2017.
Igor Plotnitsky, leader of the self-proclaimed part of the Luhansk region, also announced a cease-fire on Tuesday.
The ministry applauded the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics for announcing “a unilateral ceasefire from 00:00 a.m. local time on September 15”. “One serviceman remains unaccounted for”, he told reporters.
The comment came soon after Ukrainian presidential spokesman Svyatoslav Tsegolko wrote on his Facebook account that his boss, Petro Poroshenko, had instructed Ukrainian diplomats to inform Russia that it was impossible to hold Russian elections on Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine stands ready to enter a dialogue with Russian Federation over Kiev’s 3-billion-U.S. -dollar debt, Ukrainian Finance Minister Alexander Danyluk said on Tuesday.
Poroshenko, who said earlier on Tuesday that he would not send that bill to parliament until the time is right, later said he expects it to vote on the amendments “in the nearest future”.
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If the ceasefire holds and the agreement is signed as expected, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russian Federation could meet in NY next week on the sidelines of a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
