FRANCE SUSPENDS SHIP DELIVERY
Responding to international pressure, France suspended the delivery of a warship to Russia at least until November amid security concerns over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis, officials said Wednesday. The Vladivostok, the first of two Mistral-class helicopter carriers ordered by Russia, was due to be delivered next month as part of a $1.6 billion contract — the biggest-ever sale of NATO weaponry to Moscow. The second ship, named Sevastopol, ironically, after a port in the Russia-annexed Crimean Peninsula, has been slated for delivery next year. In an announcement on the eve of a NATO summit in Wales, French President Francois Hollande’s office called the fighting in eastern Ukraine “grave,” and said Russia’s recent actions harm “the foundations of security in Europe.”
— Associated Press
Collapsing Ukrainian government defenses and a growing public hunger for peace have forced President Petro Poroshenko to seek a truce with pro-Russia separatists at a time when the Kremlin-allied militants have the upper hand in the conflict, analysts said Wednesday.
Russia, too, could benefit from a pause in the fighting that would allow the separatists to solidify their hold on newly seized territory. But Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be holding out for a humiliating concession of defeat by Kiev.
Poroshenko’s desperate search for a way out of the crisis was apparent in his premature announcement of a “lasting cease-fire” reportedly agreed with Putin on Wednesday — a claim the Kremlin disputed.
“Russia cannot physically agree on a cease-fire, as it is not a side in the conflict,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the RIA Novosti news agency.
Later Wednesday, Putin spoke to reporters during a visit to Mongolia, outlining his own proposals for ending what he portrayed as a Ukrainian civil war. His plan calls for a halt to the pro-Russia militants’ offensive and withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from their country’s eastern region.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk quickly denounced Putin’s proposal as a plot to “ruin Ukraine and restore the Soviet Union.”
Putin insists Russia has sent neither troops nor weapons into Ukraine, despite numerous reports to the contrary. He casts the conflict as a dispute between a “Kiev junta” and Russian-speaking eastern residents who are “demonstrating” for more autonomy for their regions.
Ukrainian and Western officials accuse Moscow of instigating the crisis and fueling it with infusions of Russian fighters and arms.
Ukrainian government troops appeared on the verge of defeating the separatists last month, after key Russian commanders withdrew and returned to Russia. But after Moscow sent a 280-truck convoy purportedly bearing humanitarian aid into the last separatist-held enclaves and, according to NATO and Kiev, dispatched two columns of tanks into Ukraine’s Sea of Azov region, the tide of the fighting turned.
Government forces have suffered major setbacks over the past 10 days since the Russian incursion opened a new front along the Azov coastal road, drawing Kiev’s troops away from the separatists hemmed in in Donetsk and Luhansk. Separatist control of the coastal highway would provide a land bridge between the Russian mainland and Crimea, the strategic peninsula seized from Ukraine and annexed to Russia earlier this year.
The Ukrainian army’s withdrawal from the town of Ilovaysk last week signaled a collapse of confidence, said Balazs Jarabik, a scholar monitoring Ukraine with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The country is trying to digest the defeat in Ilovaysk,” Jarabik said, citing reports of as many as 700 government troops still trapped behind separatist lines.
More than 2,600 people have died in five months of fighting, including 800 Ukrainian soldiers, defense officials said last week. Russia remains silent about its casualties in Ukraine, burying its dead and treating its injured in secrecy, according to independent media reports.
Ukrainian society is deeply split over how and whether to end the fighting, and that division is likely to worsen during the campaign for Oct. 26 parliamentary elections, Jarabik said.
“Ukraine may end up with a highly divided parliament that would further weaken central authority,” he said.
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