Juncker, Poroshenko to discuss Ukraine's troubled truce
Brussels, Aug 21, 2015 (AFP) -- European Commission chief Jean Claude Juncker will hold talks in Brussels next week with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the tattered ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, the EU said Friday.
Juncker will meet with Poroshenko next Thursday to discuss "implementation of the Minsk agreement", Commission spokeswoman Annika Breidthardt told reporters.
An escalation in fighting is threatening a peace deal signed in February in the Belarus capital of Minsk between the pro-Western Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists.
The Brussels talks will follow meetings Poroshenko will have on Monday in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who were both present at the Minsk agreement's signing.
President Vladimir Putin -- who persistently denies any Kremlin involvement in the crisis and calls Russian soldiers discovered in the war zone "volunteers" -- has been notably omitted from the round of meetings.
The EU's External Action Service said August 11 that mounting attacks in government-held areas of eastern Ukraine violated "the spirit and the letter of the Minsk agreements, without explicitly blaming pro-Russian separatists.
Some Kiev politicians accuse Moscow of planning a new rebel offensive that could rattle the Ukrainian leadership enough to reverse its plans to implement a landmark trade treaty with the European Union at the start of next year.
Russia has already threatened to expand its list of banned Ukrainian food imports should the agreement go into effect.
Yet Poroshenko has said that he and Juncker had agreed by telephone that the "free trade zone should be strengthened as of January 1."
The United Nations believes the conflict -- Europe's deadliest since the 1990s wars in the Balkans -- has killed more than 6,800 people and driven 1.4 million from their homes.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) has reported the detention of a Sartana resident who, according to officials, was helping pro-Russian separatists adjust their fire.
According to the SBU, a separatist who goes by the nom de guerre Zharik was in charge of the shelling. The person, who was adjusting the fire for him, was a local Sartana resident, an employee of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.
“He informed [the separatists] about the targets of shelling while in Mariupol, where he arrived the day before,” said the SBU.
The officials even published alleged phone conversations between the two:
Three people were killed in Sartana shelling on August 17. Sartana lies close to the port city of Mariupol.
The majority of trucks in an alleged humanitarian convoy sent to the Donbas by Russia were “half empty” when they crossed the Ukrainian border, Ukraine’s State Border Service says.
The 36th Russian humanitarian convoy crossed the border on August 20 and did so “illegally,” according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia and the separatists say that there was food in the trucks.
Ukraine has claimed that shelling by the separatists intensifies after the arrival of the so-called “humanitarian convoys” from Russia. Ukrainian officials allege that the trucks bring weapons to the rebels. Russia and the separatists have denied these allegations.
Shopping Spray: Loutish Russian's Beer-Biting Patriotism
As the food-destruction craze over banned Western goods continues in Russia, the St. Petersburg Orthodox Union of Cossacks and a very large former band member have joined in.
The group went to a local store of the French supermarket chain Auchan -- which was recently targeted by Russian authorities for "systematic" inspections -- in search of prohibited imported goods. The resulting spectacle, accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and captured on video, looks like performance art.
The star of the video is Stas Baretsky, a former member of rock band Leningrad who is notorious for his oversized red sportcoat and outrageous combativeness on live television.
In it, he claims he is a newly appointed minister of culture for the Cossacks Union. Strolling through the shop, he asks an employee why a foreign brand of beer is "on the most visible display." Baretsky then bites into the can and tears it in two, spraying beer all over the place:
Read more here.
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Friday, August 21. Thanks for reading. Check back here tomorrow morning for more of our continuing coverage.