Leaders from Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine will gather Wednesday in Berlin to discuss further action on the Minsk peace plan, which was meant to end the violence in Eastern Ukraine.
German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement on Tuesday that German President Angela Merkel invited the foreign leaders to “discuss the next steps” needed to insure peace in the region.
The decision on the Wednesday meeting came after sporadic communication between the four sides over the past week and, according to Seibert, isn’t expected to produce any kind of breakthrough.
“If there were such a meeting, no one should expect that it will resolve all the problems,” he said on Monday.
The aim of the meeting is to help Ukraine re-establish its borders after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Russia supports an insurgent group in eastern Ukraine that controls the territory.
The Minsk agreement, signed in the Belarusian capital in September 2014 by representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the separatist rebels, calls on Ukraine to decentralize power and adopt laws providing for self-governance in areas of eastern Ukraine currently controlled by the separatists.
Ukraine has accused Russia of not doing enough to influence rebels to relinquish control over parts of the Ukrainian-Russian border.
Russia, for its part, has accused Ukraine of not adopting the constitutional amendments Moscow says it was obligated to introduce granting autonomy to parts of eastern Ukraine.
All sides involved have already agreed to the terms of the peace deal signed in 2015, though it has failed to stop the fighting in the area.
…