Ukrainian government troops and Russia-backed rebels scrambled for positions along two main fronts in Debaltseve and Mariupol on Thursday before a ceasefire agreed in Minsk takes effect this weekend.
Besides a truce, the Minsk agreement stipulates that Kiev pulls back heavy weapons from the de facto frontline, while the rebels are supposed to pull back heavy weapons from the demarcation line established by the September Minsk agreement. Pro-Russia forces have reportedly captured another 200 square miles of territory since September.
Kiev said on Thursday afternoon that two soldiers had been killed and 21 wounded in the past 24 hours at the strategic node of Debaltseve, a railway hub held by thousands of Ukrainian troops and seemingly besieged by rebel forces, where there have been weeks of fighting.
After the Minsk negotiations ended, Vladimir Putin said he and the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, disagreed over Debaltseve’s status and would appoint “military experts” to work out a plan of action. Putin argued that if the Ukrainian forces were indeed surrounded, they should leave the town through a corridor provided by the rebels. Kiev has insisted its forces are not cut off.
Fighting also continued during the day over Lohvynove, a town on the highway connecting Debaltseve to other Ukrainian positions. Without this lifeline, Kiev is unlikely to be able to hold the town.
Russian television showed separatist forces fighting to preserve their reported encirclement of Debaltseve on Thursday, and quoted separatist leaders saying artillery had fired shells into the town containing leaflets calling on Ukrainian forces to surrender.
Local media in Mariupol reported on Thursday that shelling was continuing around the nearby village of Shirokino as residents were being evacuated. Ukrainian forces began pushing east along the Azov Sea coast from Mariupol toward rebel-held Novoazovsk this week in what Poroshenko said was a counter-offensive to restore the frontline to where it was in September. The pro-Kiev Azov battalion said on its Facebook account that it had repulsed rebel attacks on Shirokino on Thursday, although it said a significant number of homes in the village have been destroyed.
Despite a point in the Minsk agreement that all foreign forces be withdrawn, Kiev said on Thursday that armour from Russia was building up in eastern Ukraine. Military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said 50 tanks, 40 missile systems and 40 armoured vehicles had entered Ukraine from Russia via the Izvaryne crossing overnight.
“The enemy continues to strengthen its forces in the most dangerous areas, especially in north-east Luhansk region and in the direction of Debaltseve,” Lysenko said.
Moscow has repeatedly said it is not arming the rebels, and the Kremlin’s official line is that the Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine are volunteers or soldiers on leave from the army. But while Russians by all accounts outnumber other foreigners fighting in eastern Ukraine, the foreign ministry in Moscow on Thursday blamed other countries for the “vicious practice” of allowing their citizens to fight for Ukraine, in response to a report that Croatian volunteers were assisting Kiev.
A difficult point of the treaty to implement will be re-establishing Kiev’s control of the porous border, through which Russian volunteers, arms and allegedly troops have been coming to the rebels’ aid. Poroshenko said Kiev will only restore full control of the border by the end of 2015.
The Minsk treaty also left the issue of Ukraine’s possible Nato status unresolved, which will almost certainly mean further disagreements with Moscow. The Kremlin had reportedly been seeking a guarantee that Ukraine, which recently revoked a law on its non-aligned political status, would not join Nato.
Although the leaders of Poland and Lithuania decreed the Minsk agreement a cave-in to Putin’s demands, Ukrainian officials portrayed it as a win for Kiev. Ukrainian foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, tweeted that the latest treaty had preserved the “logic” of the first Minsk agreement and prevented a frozen conflict.
Although Poroshenko promised constitutional reform giving local elections and greater authority to rebel-controlled areas, Klimkin argued the president had avoided giving them wide autonomy along the lines of Chechnya, which Russia fought two bloody wars to retain.
A Ukrainian military spokesman said it would adhere to the conditions set down in Minsk and that the success of the peace plan would depend on the rebels’ actions.
Speaking after the talks, Donetsk rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko called the treaty a “major victory for the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics”, but the fledgling peace process remained very fragile. Zakharchenko warned that all “responsibility will be on Petro Poroshenko”, and if Kiev violates the new agreements, “there will be no meetings and new agreements,” Russian news agency Interfax reported.
Residents of Donetsk, where civilians have continued to be killed by shelling this week, greeted the news of the peace agreement with cautious optimism. A small group of people rallied outside the rebel government’s headquarters in the Donetsk regional administration building with flags of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republic of Donetsk”, and a woman on stage declared that “today is a holiday.”
In a piece published on Thursday by Radio Liberty, Mikola Mikolayenko, an engineer from rebel-controlled Horlivka, said Ukrainian partisans in the area were likely to continue fighting despite the Minsk agreement.
The announcement of the treaty was welcomed with some triumphalism in Russia on Thursday but officials and experts said the deal did not represent a final settlement to the conflict. In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry warned of the “extremely important and difficult period of realisation of the Minsk agreements”.
“The new Minsk agreement is the sum of what Russia has demanded from Kiev all this time. A good result,” political analyst Alexei Mukhin tweeted on Thursday.
“Now everything hinges on fulfilment of the agreement: serious frictions are very likely. The key is implementation,” senior MP and head of the Russian Duma’s foreign affairs committee Alexei Pushkov tweeted.
There was confusion over the fate of Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian army pilot, who has been held in Russia since July and whose case has become a cause celebre for Kiev. Although Poroshenko said Savchenko would be included in a prisoner swap agreed between the two sides, Savchenko’s lawyers in Moscow said she was unlikely to be freed.
“She wasn’t included in the list for the exchange … a trial is likely in order to observe all procedural formalities,” Savchenko’s lawyer, Mark Feigin, told Interfax news agency.
The Russian rouble, which collapsed last year in the face of western sanctions on Moscow and falling oil prices, rebounded sharply on the news of the ceasefire and hopes that a de-escalation of the conflict may signal the lifting of sanctions and an easing of the pressure on Russia’s reeling economy. But the currency’s gains were fleeting and had been had been erased entirely by the afternoon in Moscow.
“This is a ceasefire agreement that, at the present moment, is advantageous for all the Minsk meeting participants,” former Russian Central Bank official and economist Sergei Aleksashenko wrote on his blog for radio station Ekho Moskvy on Thursday.
“Putin has responded to the threat of another wave of sanctions and shown that he is not prepared to up the stakes when economic boat has started to sink,” he wrote. “We will soon see whether this will be Prague in 1938 or Potsdam in 1945.”
In order to supervise the peace process, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe announced it would increase the number of its monitors in Ukraine to 500, of which 350 will monitor the situation in eastern Ukraine.
