Merkel, Hollande arrived in Moscow for Ukraine talks:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have arrived in Moscow in a diplomatic push for peace in eastern Ukraine.
Merkel and Hollande were to present Russian President Vladimir Putin with a new proposal to end the conflict between government forces and Russian-backed rebels that has killed more than 5,350 people since April and raised East-West tension to a level unseen since the Cold War.
The French and German leaders arrived on separate planes in the early evening.
No details of their proposal have emerged, but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said talks with Merkel and Hollande in Kyiv on February 5 raised "hope for a cease-fire."
Putin is facing growing Western pressure to abandon support for the separatists, who hold parts of two provinces and have gained ground in a recent escalation that has killed hundreds of people in less than a month.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on February 6 that Russia "continues to escalate the conflict by sending mercenaries and tanks" into Ukraine, and warned that Moscow "cannot be allowed to redraw the map of Europe."
Talks begin in Moscow:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a diplomatic push for peace in eastern Ukraine.
Merkel and Hollande were to present Putin with a new proposal to end the conflict between government forces and Russian-backed rebels that has killed more than 5,350 people in since April and raised East-West tension to a level unseen since the Cold War.
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the three leaders were meeting "eye-to-eye" in the Kremlin without other members of the visiting delegations or lower-level officials.
The talks began at about 7:30 p.m. Moscow time (1630 GMT/UTC).
1945 all over again?
When Russia last went to war, in Georgia in 2008, it looked like an easy victory. But Russia's generals were deeply concerned at how badly their forces performed in some key areas of modern warfare. Since then, Russia has been intensively reorganizing, rearming, reequipping and retraining its forces in order to deal with those deficiencies, and to try and close the capability gap with modern Western armies.
Now, with that work still in progress, Russia has a chance to try out some of its new systems and capabilities under combat conditions. While much of the Russian hardware deployed in Ukraine is not new, and some systems that are compare poorly with Western equivalents, they still represent significant developments in Russian capability.
Two key examples are the use of UAVs − drones − for surveillance and targeting, and the use of electronic warfare (EW). Both of these were identified as areas of weakness in the Russian forces in 2008, and both have been intensively developed since. Now they are in widespread use in eastern Ukraine; Ukrainian forces have not gone through the same intensive modernization process, and are at a strong disadvantage when they come up against newer equipment supplied by Russia.
This is why the Ukrainian government has consistently been requesting supplies of not just weapons, but also ‘non-lethal’ assistance and equipment, in order better to resist Russian-supplied separatist forces. The public refusals by Western governments to provide this assistance work in Russia's favour: not only by keeping the Ukrainian government forces relatively weak, but also by signalling clearly where the West's limits lie and thereby simplifying President Vladimir Putin's risk assessments.