After more than nine hours of crisis talks in Berlin, Kremlin in Moscow lack of progress in the Ukraine conflict lamented. The government in Kiev is doing everything possible not to fulfill its obligations in the peace plan for eastern Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. The talks in Berlin with Franco-German mediation did not bring any tangible results on Thursday. Russia and Ukraine have different interpretations of the Minsk peace agreement – and have therefore not come together for years.
Russia had vowed that Germany and France would support the peace plan. However, Moscow criticized the fact that Berlin and Paris did not put pressure on Kiev to fulfill the points. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he disagreed with the deal. Russia, on the other hand, emphasizes that Ukraine has signed the peace plan and that the United Nations has also supported it with a resolution.
Meanwhile, in the regions controlled by pro-Russian separatists, leaders in the major cities of Luhansk and Donetsk fear that Ukrainian government troops will seize the could bring back areas with military force. “It is obvious that Ukraine is preparing for war,” the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Puschilin, said in a press conference on Friday.
The US and other countries would supply arms and ammunition to Ukraine. “We see some more reasonable countries that do not want to supply weapons, but they are being urged to do so,” Puschilin said. Germany does not deliver weapons. According to UN estimates, more than 14,000 people have died in the conflict so far, according to statistics, most of them in the separatist area.