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Ukraine peace talks focus on withdrawls, prisoners

The Columbian
Published: December 23, 2014, 4:00pm

MINSK, Belarus — Talks on ending more than eight months of conflict in Ukraine resumed Wednesday after the country’s parliament angered Russia by voting to cancel its non-aligned status.

Ukrainian and pro-Russian separatist representatives met in Minsk, along with diplomats from Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to discuss implementing agreements on prisoner exchanges and the withdrawal of heavy weaponry. The talks ended for the night, and participants left the venue without commenting to reporters.

“We hope that these efforts will in the end lead to the stabilization of the situation,” Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday.

A two-week truce has tempered the bloodshed in a conflict that has killed more than 4,700 people since April in fighting between government forces and separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraine’s parliament on Tuesday moved to drop the country’s neutral status, which Russia denounced as a step toward seeking membership of NATO.

The legislation put forward by President Petro Poroshenko was supported Tuesday by 303 of 357 lawmakers in the chamber, hours after the announcement that the Ukraine contact group would meet today and Dec. 26 in Minsk.

In a phone call at the start of the week, Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande emphasized the need to fulfill agreements made at the contact group’s last meeting in September, including “withdrawal of troops and heavy armament, as well as immediate liberation” of all prisoners, according to the Ukrainian president’s website.

The talks may focus on the full prisoner swap, according to Ukrainian State Security Service adviser Markiyan Lubkivsky. Ukraine has a list of 225 names ready, including Russian officers, he said, declining to disclose how many.

“The main task at the moment is to stop the violence,” Alexei Panin, deputy director of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow-based research group, said by phone. The confrontation in Ukraine may evolve into a frozen conflict that could encourage the European Union to lift sanctions against Russia by mid-2015, though U.S. measures imposed over the crisis will remain.

Ukraine has increasingly sought integration with Europe after protests broke out against Kremlin-backed former President Viktor Yanukovych last year. The country is seeking to achieve “all criteria of membership” for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told parliament Tuesday.

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