Germany to host Ukraine peace summit in Berlin
BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday announced her first summit in over a year with the Russian, Ukrainian and French presidents to discuss efforts toward peace in eastern Ukraine, but ratcheted down expectations of any significant progress.
Merkel invited Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and French President Francois Hollande to meet in Berlin on Wednesday evening. The meeting comes amid tensions between the West and Russia over Moscow’s military support for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces, which the German and French leaders also plan to address.
The 2015 Minsk agreement brokered by France and Germany has helped end large-scale battles between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine, but clashes have continued and efforts to reach a political settlement have stalled.
“We have not achieved what we wanted to and we are not as far along as we wanted to be,” Merkel told reporters.