You're reading: New Minsk talks to begin on Dec. 9 after several cease-fire attempts fail

A new round of three-sided talks to settle the war in eastern Ukraine will take place in Minsk on Dec. 9, President Petro Poroshenko has announced.

A contact group of Ukrainian, Russian and international representatives has already held two rounds of negotiations in Minsk, Belarus, in September. The agreements known as the Minsk protocol were reached but routinely violated by Russia and Kremlin-backed proxies in the Donbas oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk..

Poroshenko expects that the new talks will pursue the implementation of the earlier Minsk protocol, including a full permanent cease-fire.

Poroshenko announced a one-day truce on the day of the talks, Dec. 9, to test if the fighting can truly be halted. On Dec. 6, Poroshenko said he was “moderately optimistic” about the possibility to stop the fighting on Dec. 9.

“Ukraine’s task (in the new Minsk talks) is to set up the schedule for implementing the Minsk protocol,” Interfax Ukraine agency quoted Poroshenko to say.

This effort to put an end to the deadly eight-months-long military conflict between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government comes after several recent cease-fire attempts failed.

The representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the two self-proclaimed separatist republics have agreed on a cease-fire in the Luhansk Oblast starting from Dec. 5 and a similar one in the Donetsk Airport area starting Dec. 2. The deals failed to work, and shelling continued in both areas.

Moreover, the insurgents have intensified their attacks on Donetsk Airport, according to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. A record number of Russian special forces have been killed near the airport this month, Ukrainian authorities and Russian human rights activist Yelena Vasilyeva said earlier in December.

One of the separatists leader Oleksandr Zakharchenko blamed the weak subordination on Ukrainian side for the failed cease-fire deals. It made all the negotiations within the trilateral Minsk contact group “counterproductive,” he said.

“Some people talk about peace and others start shooting,” he told Russian news agency ITAR-TASS on Dec. 5.

For Ukraine’s Poroshenko, the key condition to begin peace talks with the insurgents in the east is the cancellation of the results of the local elections that the separatists held in the occupied territories on Nov. 2. He means to organize new, legal elections in the area once the Minsk agreements begin to work.

Right before the new Minsk negotiations were announced, a big number of Russian armored vehicles was seen entering Ukraine. According to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, some 120 vehicles entered Ukraine in two columns on the night of Dec. 5 from Russia’s Rostov Oblast. Among them, there were seven tanks which moved towards Luhansk, one of the separatists’ main strongholds.

In 10 months of war, including Russia’s invasion of Crimea, more than 5,000 people have been killed, including 1,252 Ukrainian servicemen, according to Poroshenko on Dec. 5.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov contributed to this story.