Reuters, 02/03 16:28 CET
By Noah Barkin and John Irish
BERLIN/PARIS (Reuters) – For
months, as progress in implementing the Minsk peace deal for eastern
Ukraine stalled, its architects, Germany and France, held out hope that
with time and carefully calibrated pressure on Kiev and Moscow, the
agreement could be pushed back on track.
But since a joint visit by the German and French foreign
ministers to Ukraine’s capital last week, a gloomier view has taken
hold: that political dysfunction in Kiev has all but doomed the chances
of it delivering on its own commitments under the peace agreement.
Against that backdrop and a rise in ceasefire violations
in the east, where Ukrainian government forces are faced off against
pro-Russian rebels, ministers from Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine
meet in Paris on Thursday to discuss Minsk.
One of the meeting’s main goals is to tackle what is now
seen in many European capitals as the biggest hurdle to the peace deal —
Kiev’s failure to push through an election law for the Donbass region
of eastern Ukraine that would set the stage for a vote there by
mid-year.
After barely surviving a no-confidence motion last month,
Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk is seen as too weak to deliver. And yet
there are few viable alternatives to Yatseniuk.
“At some point you have to ask yourself, how can it go on
like this?” a senior German official said of Minsk, which was hammered
out a year ago in marathon talks in the Belarus capital between
Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande, Ukrainian President
Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladmir Putin.
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Source: Euronews
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