KYIV – A peaceful resolution to the Donbas war remained elusive following talks between Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Pavlo Klimkin and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that was mediated by the top diplomats of France and Germany in Berlin on June 11.
Known as the Normandy format, the quartet of foreign envoys from each country hadn’t met in a year and a half and made no headway to implementing a truce that was brokered in the Belarus capital of Minsk in early 2015.
Co-mediator German Foreign Affairs Minister Heiko Mass said that “Ukraine and Russia’s interests and views lie far apart in many areas.”
“The implementation of the Minsk accords stalled for too long at the expense of the people in eastern Ukraine, who wish for nothing more ardently than peace,” Mr. Mass told the German newspaper Bild.
Discussions focused on having peacekeepers deployed to the Donbas war zone, according to Mr. Klimkin as cited by Interfax Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko discussed a prisoner exchange with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in a telephone conversation two days before the Berlin meeting of foreign ministers.
No breakthrough was made in either area.
Mr. Klimkin said that Ukraine, France and Germany are for having peacekeepers from the United Nations, whereas the Russian foreign minister insists on having “the fake special monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe (OSCE).”
Kyiv and Moscow also have disagreed on the sequence of actions that should be taken to fulfill the failed Minsk peace agreement. Namely, the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the frontline and removal of all foreign combatants, including Russians, as well as granting the two easternmost regions of Donetsk and Luhansk special status and provision of amnesty to certain elements that took up arms against the Ukrainian government.
Mr. Lavrov said that he held a private conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart before dinner on “exchanging captives and [the] need to support the OSCE mission in Donbas with U.N. authority,” Interfax reported.
Mt. Klimkin said that both sides are considering holding a meeting between the leaders of each of the four countries in the “near future.”
The last such meeting took place in February 2015 and led to the second of two unfilled truces in the Donbas war.
“We should determine whether it makes sense to hold a meeting at the highest level,” Mr. Klimkin said, according to Interfax. “We spoke of the significance today of such a meeting… we didn’t set an exact date, but agreed to work on this to… outline the framework and identify two to three issues that have exclusive political importance for the heads of state to resolve.”
Already in its fifth year, the Russian-instigated war has killed over 10,300 people and displaced at least 1.5 million since Moscow first invaded the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in late February 2014.
As a result, Kyiv doesn’t control over 7 percent of its territory and 409 kilometers of its shared border with Russia, and is defending a 447-kilometer frontline from forces the Kremlin commands and controls.
May was the bloodiest month this year. Ten Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 91 wounded, according to U.S. State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert.
“Hot war” continues
Kurt Volker, the U.S. special envoy for establishing peace in Ukraine, said in a June 12 tweet that “there is a hot war in eastern Ukraine that has created a grinding, degrading humanitarian crisis all caused by Russia’s intervention.”
Overnight on the same day, one Ukrainian soldier was killed by a Russian sniper, reported Kyiv’s Joint Forces Operation, which replaced the Anti-Terrorist Operation.
Only 13 percent of the $215 million that the United Nations says is needed to meet humanitarian funding requirements in the Donbas has been fulfilled, according to the global organization’s May 29 report, indicating that the international community has forgotten about the crisis.
Some 3.4 million people lack the basics in education, food security, health, protection, shelter and hygiene.
Alarmingly, Ukraine also is gradually losing control over its maritime waters to Russia in the Azov Sea that is crucial for preventing an amphibious attack and securing vital commercial shipping routes from two ports.
Russian artillery boats and small missile ships were redeployed from the Caspian to the Azov Sea, policy center Jamestown Foundation wrote in an analytical piece on June 11. The flotilla is capable of making “high-precision strikes on the entire depth of the territory of Ukraine from two offshore operational zones simultaneously – on either side of the Kerch Strait.” [See news analyses on page 3.]
Merchant vessels from the Mariupol and Berdiansk ports have also been subjected to lengthy inspections by Russian forces endangering vital Ukrainian export commodities like grain and steel.
“Russia’s strategy… seems designed to take control of the waters all the way up to the Ukrainian coastline, thus putting pressure and additional costs on Ukraine-bound maritime shipping traffic,” the Jamestown analysis said. “In fact, like a boa constrictor, it aims to economically strangle …And the broader implications of this strategy become clear when lessons from the Crimea annexation are juxtaposed against evidence of Russia’s growing regional amphibious potential and the apparent directions of its offensive training drills.”
Meanwhile, Kyiv met a deadline on June 12 to submit proof that Russia is financing terrorism and engaging in racial discrimination to the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
“Today, Russia will receive from us a peculiar ‘gift’ at the ICJ,” Mr. Klimkin tweeted. “It weighs about 90 kilograms, consists of 17,500 pages of text and is contained in 29 volumes.”
The case pertains to Russia’s alleged violation of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.