View Video: During a visit to Kiev, Secretary of State John Kerry urged Russia to commit to a diplomatic solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine by halting its military aid for the separatists and backing a negotiated peace. ( AP)
FEBRUARY 5, 2015
KIEV, Ukraine — The leaders of Germany and France on Thursday announced a surprise diplomatic bid to end the conflict in Ukraine, working to forestall White House deliberations about arming government forces amid fears that the war could quickly spiral out of control.
The new peace effort came as civilian and military casualties have mounted by the hundreds in recent weeks. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande said they would fly to Moscow on Friday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to strike a deal. The unusual journey underscored the high stakes in the effort to quell the bloodiest European conflict since the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
But Western officials noted deep uncertainty about whether the diplomacy would yield results, as Russia has steadfastly maintained that it is not a party to the conflict. Ukraine and its Western allies have said the Kremlin is fueling the war with weaponry, supplies and soldiers.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Thursday joined in the efforts in a visit to the Ukrainian capital, arriving just hours ahead of Merkel and Hollande.
Despite calls in Washington for the United States to start arming Ukraine with defensive weaponry, Kerry said the White House is still reviewing its options.
President Obama will make a decision on arms “soon” after talks with advisers, Kerry said.
“We want a diplomatic resolution,” he said. “But we cannot close our eyes to tanks that are crossing the border from Russia and coming into Ukraine. We can’t close our eyes to Russian fighters in unmarked uniforms crossing the border and leading individual companies of so-called separatists in battle.”
Kerry urged Russia to pull back weapons and troops to restore the tattered cease-fire. He also called for a sealed border between rebel-held eastern Ukraine and Russia.
Russian diplomats said Thursday that they would view any U.S. move to arm the Ukrainians as a direct threat to their nation’s security.
More than 5,300 people have died in Ukraine since hostilities began in April, according to U.N. estimates. Rebels have taken hundreds of square miles of territory since a September deal to halt the fighting and freeze the territorial land grabs. At least eight people died in the past 24 hours.
Rebel leaders warned this week that they would mobilize vast forces against Ukrainian troops in the eastern part of the country. Russia, meanwhile, announced large-scale military exercises in recent days; such a step came ahead of a previous escalation in August.
The sudden diplomatic effort — which will bring Merkel to Moscow for the first time since relations soured with Russia nearly a year ago — appeared to be a last-ditch measure to halt the conflict. Merkel, a Russian speaker from formerly Communist East Germany, was once the Western leader considered best able to bargain with Putin. But she broke with him this year after the escalations in Ukraine and has been reluctant to hand him the public relations coup of a visit to Moscow, analysts say.
Putin sent his Ukrainian counterpart a letter in recent days with proposals to halt the fighting, his top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters in Moscow on Thursday.
Western officials who had been briefed on Putin’s proposals said that they amounted to an attempt at a new quasi-independent Russian-backed statelet similar to Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Georgia — a step that would be distasteful to the West and politically impossible in Kiev.
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