Ukrainian, Russian officials craft 'buffer zone'

Senior Ukrainian and Russian military officials met on Friday to mark out a proposed 30-kilometer "buffer zone" in eastern Ukraine from which government forces and separatists will remove weapons, Ukrainian military officials said.

The officials said a three-way group, which also included 76 Russian military officials and representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, met north of the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

Envoys from Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE agreed at an earlier meeting in the Belarussian capital of Minsk on Sept 19 to establish the buffer zone and remove artillery, heavy weapons and mines from the area to build on the cease-fire that was declared on Sept 5.

"This group, in particular, will work on defining the lines of separation and defining the so-called buffer zone," Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said.

"It will monitor the fulfillment of the agreements, separate the warring sides and guarantee this 30-km zone," another military official, Vladyslav Selezyov, said.

The meeting to create the buffer zone was the first concrete follow-up to the cease-fire that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called three weeks ago after heavy battlefield losses for which Kiev blamed Russia, claiming it had intervened on behalf of the separatists.

Moscow denies any direct military involvement in the conflict, in which more than 3,000 people have been killed. It also denies arming the separatists.

The Minsk memorandum foresees the warring sides pulling out large-caliber artillery and other heavy weapons, while also removing mines, to create a zone keeping them out of striking range of one another.

A Ukrainian military statement said the zone would be divided into four or five security sectors, which would be monitored by OSCE officials and by Ukraine and Russia.

Talks with Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Poroshenko have discussed the possibility of meeting, either alone or with the leaders of Germany and France, a senior Kremlin official said on Friday.

Putin and Poroshenko have met twice since April. Poroshenko said on Thursday that he and Putin would meet in Europe in the next three weeks "in a multilateral format".

Russian foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said: "Our president and Mr Poroshenko are, in phone calls, discussing a possible personal contact in a bilateral or international format ... with the participation of the German chancellor and the French president. But precise dates have not yet been discussed."

(China Daily 09/27/2014 page11)