Kiev--Foreign ministers from Moscow and Kiev meet their French and German counterparts in Berlin on Monday to arrange a Ukrainian peace summit that the Europeans fear is premature because of festering fighting.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko hopes to stage the leadership meeting in the Kazakh capital Astana on Thursday so that two of his closest allies could push Vladimir Putin into signing a document that finally commits Russia to peace.
A September 5 truce agreed by the two presidents' envoys was followed by 1,300 more deaths and has ultimately failed to end the pro-Kremlin militias' separatist claim in the industrial southeast of Ukraine.
But German Chancellor Merkel informed both Putin and Poroshenko over the weekend that she would not fly to Central Asia to put her name on a deal that is valid only on paper while clashes raged after already claiming 4,700 lives.
The rebel stronghold of Donetsk -- a once bustling city of nearly one million that now stands half vacant and suffering chronic power and water shortages -- has been the target of especially heavy rocket and artillery fire in the past week.
Kiev accuses the rebels of escalating their strikes in order to undermine the chances of Putin agreeing to a settlement that preserves Ukraine's eastern border with Russia and buries their independence hopes.
A partial Donetsk power outage on Sunday trapped more than 300 miners inside one of Europe's largest coal pits for several hours with limited oxygen supplies.
Residents fear that stray shells could do similar damage to combustible natural gas lines that snake across former Soviet lands.
Ukraine's armed forces said the militias attacked federal positions on 63 occasions since Sunday morning -- about five times the number recorded on more peaceful days witnessed in the nine-month war.
AFP
