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It just might be the most significant attempt at a truce yet.
Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine agreed overnight in Belarus to create a wide buffer zone between each side’s forces, to withdraw heavy weapons out of reach of one another and to send foreign fighters home.
The heaviest fighting in a series of truce violations in Ukraine’s restive east strained the tenuous 10-day-old cease-fire between the Kiev government and pro-Russian separatists, with both sides blaming the other on Monday for attacks that included the shelling of residential buildings.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko on Monday accused the rebels of attacking checkpoints and other positions in the east in intensified fighting over the weekend. The Ukrainian military, he said, was forced to respond.
According to Ukraine army HQ press officer Olexy Dmytrashkivsky, the army repulsed another night enemy attack on the Donetsk airport – despite the peace agreement signed in Minsk.
Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels reached a ceasefire agreement on Friday, the first step toward ending fighting in eastern Ukraine that has caused the worst standoff between Moscow and the West since the Cold War ended.
The ceasefire deal was struck in the Belarussian capital Minsk along with a deal allowing for prisoner exchanges, deliveries of humanitarian aid and the withdrawal of heavy weapons after five months of a conflict that has killed more than 2,600 people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Pyotr Poroshenko have “to a great extent” agreed on the steps to cease fire in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.