Ukraine’s president heard words of support from Western leaders at a Nato summit on Thursday, but a Kremlin peace offer failed to halt fighting in the east where dramatic advances by pro-Russian rebels have tipped the balance of power against Kiev.
The West believes a rebel advance since last week is the result of an assault by heavily armed Russian troops sent across the border, and has been scrambling to find a response to the biggest confrontation with Moscow since the Berlin Wall fell.
Western states have backed Kiev with words and economic sanctions on Moscow, but have also made clear that they will not fight to protect Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels rose up in two provinces after Moscow annexed the Crimea peninsula in March.
President Petro Poroshenko was invited to meet US President Barack Obama, Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande and other Western leaders at a summit of Nato in Wales hosted by Britain’s David Cameron.
“To the east, Russia has ripped up the rule book with its illegal, self-declared annexation of Crimea and its troops on Ukrainian soil threatening and undermining a sovereign nation state,” Obama and Cameron wrote in a joint newspaper editorial.
Hollande brought the biggest surprise on the eve of the summit: postponing the delivery of a helicopter carrier warship to Russia, a measure he had long resisted. Moscow accused him of caving in to US political pressure.
“France’s reputation as a reliable partner that carries out its contractual obligations has been thrown into the furnace of American political ambitions,” Russian Foreign Ministry deputy spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook.
Conflicting signals
The past few days have seen conflicting signals from Moscow. After a week of belligerent statements, President Vladimir Putin unveiled a peace proposal on Wednesday and discussed it with Poroshenko. The Ukrainian president, who has tried to keep diplomatic lines open with the Russian leader, at one point even suggested on his website on that a ceasefire was in the works.
But his prime minister, Arseny Yatseniuk, dismissed Putin’s proposal, which would require Ukraine to pull its forces out of rebel held territory, as a “deception” and said Putin’s real aim was to “destroy Ukraine and restore the USSR.”