Signs of truce in eastern Ukraine, but the situation remains fluid. After the announcement published this morning on the website of the Kiev presidency about a "permanent ceasefire" - which would have been agreed over the telephone by the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and the number one in Moscow, Vladimir Putin - the Kremlin has denied (“Russia is not a party to the conflict”). At that point the note from the Ukrainian presidency was corrected: the expression "permanent ceasefire" was replaced with "ceasefire regime".
However, Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, confirmed that in their phone call Putin and Poroshenko "have largely agreed on the steps that would favor a ceasefire between the Ukrainian military units and militiamen in the south-east of the country as soon as possible" .
A spokesman for the Ukrainian presidency then spoke of "similar evaluations" between Poroshenko and Putin on how to reach an end to hostilities.
Doubts about the agreement were immediately expressed by the US president, Barak Obama, as soon as he landed in Tallinn in Estonia for a meeting with the leaders of the Baltic countries, the first and only European stop before moving to Cardiff for the NATO summit.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the self-proclaimed Republic of Donetsk have commented saying they are "ready to resolve the conflict with Kiev politically if the government forces respect the ceasefire". But they also warned: "If this is not another political trick by Kiev like we saw in the summer, and they really decided to stop the weapons, this will help shift the process into a political channel."
Pro-Russian separatists have been fighting Kiev's forces for months in Donbass, a predominantly Russian-speaking region that hosts most of the heavy industry and accounts for about 18% of the country's economic output.
To put an end to hostilities, Putin dictates certain conditions: withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the south-east, cessation of military actions by the rebels, exclusion of the use of aviation against civilians, full and objective international control of the ceasefire, exchange of prisoners .
For his part, the Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseni Iatseniuk announced to the Council of Ministers an unspecified "Wall Project" to "build a real border with Russia". In June, the oligarch Igor Kolomoiski, governor of Dnipropetrovsk, had proposed to the government the construction of a 1.920 km long wall on the border between Ukraine and Russia, at an estimated cost of 100 million euros.
