How willing are Ukrainians to fight for Donbas? At the moment, not very, according to Shaun Walker in The Guardian:
Ruslan Kotsaba posted a video addressed to the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, last week in which he said he would rather go to prison for five years for draft-dodging than fight pro-Russia rebels in the country’s east. Now he faces 15 years in jail after being arrested for treason and obstructing the military.
His case is symptomatic of Kiev’s difficulties in mobilising a war-weary society to continue the fight against the rebels, who appear to have an unlimited supply of weapons and training from Russia. As the country nears bankruptcy and the reform programme demanded by the Maidan revolution last year is sidelined by the war effort, the drive to call up new recruits is floundering.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier speaking at a news conference in Berlin today about the Ukrainian crisis summit of German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian leaders planned for February 11 in Minsk:
"Preliminary results show that the discussions, so far, have made sense, but many open questions remain, which must be resolved before the start of the summit in Minsk."
"All involved should know that tomorrow we have another huge chance to take a big first step towards de-escalation, hopefully towards a cease-fire. But let me underline again -- nothing has been resolved yet. The fact of the summit alone is no a guarantee of its success. Therefore, I urge and expect Moscow and Kyiv to take it seriously and to really seize this chance in the face of an imminent military conflict."
"I hope that no one of those involved in the fighting will take [the conflict] to a point where an explosion of violence over the last hours would hamper the summit in Minsk. We definitely want to do all that is in our power to find political solutions. At the moment only political solutions can be a sustainable mitigation of the conflict and, hopefully, a cease-fire. That is the requirement to actually give peace in this region a perspective."
BREAKING: Obama calls Putin to discuss violence, Russian actions in Ukraine.
-- AFP, nscpress