PRESS RELEASE
Top-Level Talks on Ukraine Sabotaged by War Party
Jan. 15, 2015 (EIRNS)—The foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine met on Jan. 12 in Berlin, but made so little progress, according to German Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, that they cancelled plans for a heads-of-government summit, and instead agreed to meet among themselves again in the near future, without setting a date. Russia’s Sergey Lavrov told the EU ambassadors to Moscow that peace would come to Ukraine after the Kiev government fulfilled its promises of last April. He said the most serious problem was “the absence of any progress whatsoever, or even the beginning of motion toward carrying out constitutional reform with the participation of all regions and political forces of Ukraine—what was agreed upon back in April 2014.
“Until this process begins, the ‘party of war’ will continue to be tempted to resolve the matter of restoring and ensuring Ukraine’s territorial integrity, not on the basis for nationwide accord and consensus in society, but by force of arms. This is unacceptable and will be destructive for our Ukrainian neighbors.”
In the midst of this dangerous deterioration, a civilian inter-city bus was hit by military fire near a Kiev checkpoint in the Donetsk area on Jan. 13, killing a dozen passengers and wounding an equal number. The fascist Kiev regime immediately blamed the self-defense militias of Donetsk, who countered that the bus was deep into Kiev-held territory, far from their front lines and out of range of their weapons. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has confirmed a dangerous escalation in the fighting in the southeast, and issued an plea for “maximum restraint.”
Ukraine remains the major flashpoint for a war confrontation, as indicated in a Jan. 9 statement to that effect from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachov. The red-carpet treatment given by Germany’s Merkel government to Ukrainian Premier Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the “prime minister” of the coup regime in Kiev, and Chancellor Merkel’s de facto endorsement of his war-mongering, indicates a dangerous weakness in Germany in the face of this war threat.
