Foreign ministers from Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France have met in Berlin to try and resolve tensions threatening to scupper a planned summit on ending the Ukrainian conflict.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko hopes that a summit of the four countries can take place on Thursday in Kazakhstan with the goal of signing a peace document with Russia.
The deal would commit Ukraine and Russia to implement fully a peace accord already signed in September but which pro-Russian separatist guerrillas and Ukrainian forces have violated repeatedly in a war that has already killed more than 4700 people.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel informed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Poroshenko last weekend that the peace summit was pointless as long as a truce was not respected. France, which is the other major European broker in Ukraine peace negotiations, expressed similar reservations.
"The situation in Ukraine remains extremely tense," said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier before starting the talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Ukraine's Pavlo Klimkin and Laurent Fabius of France.
"Because there is still no permanent ceasefire, people are dying in eastern Ukraine, and the humanitarian situation ... remains very worrying," Steinmeier said.
"I don't know whether tonight will bring the necessary progress. I don't know whether tonight will bring the necessary degree of consensus that will allow us to continue working together in this format. All I know is that it would be wrong, now at the start of a new year, not to try."
Both sides in Ukraine accuse each other of being at fault for the impasse.
The rebel stronghold of Donetsk - a once bustling city that now stands half vacant and suffers chronic power and water shortages - has been shaken by heavy artillery fire in the past week.
The Ukrainian government accuses the insurgents of escalating attacks to scuttle implementation of the September peace settlement.
Ukraine's armed forces said the militias attacked federal positions on 63 occasions since Sunday morning.
The war erupted last year shortly after crowds in Kiev overturned the country's Moscow-backed president. Russia then annexed the southern province of Crimea and insurgents in the east began their uprising.
Share
