Ukraine and Rebel Delegates Say Cease-Fire Begins Today
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukrainian government forces and the pro-Russian separatist rebels fighting them in eastern Ukraine will observe a cease-fire starting on Friday(05-09-14), negotiators from all sides announced at a news conference in Minsk, Belarus.
The strength of the truce, however, was called into question by continued fighting around Mariupol, a port city in southeastern Ukraine, in the hours before it was to take effect.
Speaking from Minsk, negotiators representing the Ukrainian government, the separatists, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the cease-fire would come into force at 6 p.m. local time (11 a.m. Eastern time).
“The whole world is striving for peace. The whole of Ukraine is striving for peace, including millions of citizens in Donbass,” President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine said in a statement on his official website confirming the agreement, referring to the region where the separatist strongholds are. “The highest value is human life, and we must do everything possible to stop the bloodshed and put an end to suffering.”
Mr. Poroshenko said in his statement that he had ordered his military commanders to respect the truce and asked his foreign minister to coordinate with the O.S.C.E. to ensure that the cease-fire was observed by both sides.
In the first hour after the cease-fire was to start, Mariupol appeared to be quiet.
According to Ukrainian officials and news reports from Minsk, the cease-fire included provisions for a halt to offensive operations, an exchange of captives, the creation of safe corridors for workers to deliver aid and start rebuilding shattered infrastructure in the war zone, and monitoring of the Ukraine-Russia border. Sergei Taruta, the governor of Donetsk Province in eastern Ukraine, said the border provisions were crucial. “If we seal the borders, the problem will be resolved,” he said.
Ukraine and many Western observers have accused Russia of backing the rebels with fighters and equipment, and of moving its own troops into Ukrainian territory to support the rebels. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his government have denied those accusations and insisted that Russia is not a party to the conflict.
The cease-fire agreement was announced in Minsk by Leonid D. Kuchma, a former president of Ukraine, representing the Ukrainian government, and by Alexander Zakharchenko, the prime minister and military commander of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, representing the rebels. Russia was represented at the talks by its ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, and the O.S.C.E. by its ambassador to Belarus, Heidi Tagliavini.
The announcement had been expected, after both Mr. Poroshenko and Mr. Putin said earlier this week that a truce was likely to emerge from the talks in Minsk.
Mr. Poroshenko had long insisted that he would never negotiate with “terrorists,” as he and others in the Ukrainian government have referred to the separatist militants. Instead, the government mounted a military offensive against the separatists that made considerable progress. But Russia demonstrated in recent days that it would intervene to prevent a conclusive defeat of the rebels, leaving Mr. Poroshenko with little alternative but to negotiate a cease-fire.
Timothy Ash, a market analyst at Standard Bank in London who closely monitors developments in Ukraine and Russia, said the agreement signed in Minsk on Friday meant the conflict would probably be frozen in a political stalemate similar to those in other Russian-dominated, quasi-independent “gray zones” like Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Georgia.
“Russian regular and irregular forces are not going to withdraw unless Poroshenko delivers on Putin’s agenda for a federal solution for Ukraine, which is really a nonstarter for any Ukrainian politician and political suicide, in effect,” Mr. Ash wrote on Friday in a note to clients.
Without a cease-fire now, Mr. Ash wrote, Mr. Poroshenko risked losing Mariupol, which remained under heavy attack by pro-Russian forces on Friday. “Any delay would probably have seen the loss of Mariupol, and then a land corridor secured by Russia to Crimea,” he wrote, which would have been “likely terminal” for Ukraine’s already struggling economy.
The cease-fire was expected to be based on a plan offered by Mr. Putin on Wednesday, which included a call for an immediate end to offensive operations by both sides, a withdrawal of Ukrainian artillery out of range of separatist-controlled cities, an end to airstrikes, an exchange of all captives, the opening of humanitarian corridors for residents of the separatist-controlled areas, the repairing of damaged infrastructure, and the deployment of international observers to monitor the truce.
Before the talks in Minsk, some separatist leaders had said they would respect a cease-fire, but others said they would reject it. The separatists also demanded that all Ukrainian forces withdraw completely from disputed areas.
Ukrainian and rebel forces traded artillery fire for several hours near Mariupol on Friday morning. The sound of heavy artillery rounds landing several miles to the east was audible at midday at a military checkpoint on the eastern edge of the city, and Ukrainian forces returned the fire from inside the town.
Ukrainian soldiers mustered in the area said they were preparing an attack against the rebel forces, who had advanced to a town within about 10 miles of the city on Thursday.
“Yesterday they were attacking,” said a unit commander, who gave only his nickname, Gurza. “They took Shirokino yesterday, and now there is fighting there. We cannot see their forces. It is just artillery preparing the way.” He said the rebel forces who took Novoazovsk, a coastal town close to the Russian border, last week had since advanced about halfway from there to Mariupol.
Mr. Taruta, the provincial governor, said seven people had been killed in heavy fighting at Shirokino, four on Thursday and three on Friday, including two children. He said Ukrainian forces had repelled the rebels and had control of the town on Friday.
The rebels have repeatedly said an attack on Mariupol itself was imminent, and a spokesman for the Ukrainian military, Col. Andriy Lysenko, said in Kiev on Friday that the rebels were moving tanks, artillery and other heavy equipment into position to mount the attack. He said Russia was also beginning to mass troops along the neck of land connecting the rest of Ukraine with the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in March, with the intention of threatening Mariupol from two sides.
On the road north from Mariupol toward Donetsk, Ukrainian soldiers were strengthening their defenses, preparing to repel any rebel approach from that direction.
“It’s very dangerous,” said a Ukrainian commander of a checkpoint there, who went by the nickname Panzer. He said the Russian Army had been deployed in support of the rebels and had unleashed devastating artillery fire against Ukrainian positions.
“The Russian Army is very good,” he said. “They don’t take risks. They see us and bombard us from a distance. They fire artillery in a square. They bomb our positions, the village and anything else in the square. We can do nothing. We don’t have artillery with us.”
Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol said before the cease-fire was to start that they did not trust the agreement in Minsk to end the fighting, noting that the last round of talks in August was followed by an intense artillery offensive around the city of Donetsk that forced Ukrainian troops back from large stretches of territory. They said they expected an outright assault on Mariupol at any time.
The renewed violence came as NATO leaders, seeking to counter Russian aggression, approved plans for a rapid-reaction force in Eastern Europe that could mobilize if an alliance country in the region came under attack.
“Should you even think of attacking one ally, you will be facing the whole alliance,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general, said at the meeting in Newport, Wales, according to The Associated Press. Although Ukraine is not a NATO member, alliance nations in Central and Eastern Europe have expressed alarm at the events in eastern Ukraine.
Though some Ukrainians reject the idea of compromise with the rebels, a majority are weary of upheaval. The current crisis started with demonstrations in Kiev, the capital, last November that resulted in the overthrow of the Russian-allied government and, eventually, a conflict in the east in which more than 2,600 people have died, by the United Nations’ count.
With the NATO meeting in Wales largely focused on events in Ukraine, the government in Kiev tried on Friday to shine a spotlight on Russia’s direct involvement in fighting in the east. An estimated 2,000 Russian soldiers have died in the conflict, Colonel Lysenko said at a briefing in Kiev. He gave no basis or time frame for that figure, which could not be independently verified. He said a convoy of seven vehicles carrying dead and wounded soldiers had crossed from Ukraine into Russia on Thursday evening.
There has been an outcry in Russia among military families over the lack of information about soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Some Russians have accused the government of hiding the information, much as it did during the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Estimates of those killed and wounded have been far lower than the figure mentioned by Colonel Lysenko.
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Mariupol, Ukraine, and David M. Herszenhorn contributed from Moscow.
