Putin and Zelensky to Meet for First Time Over Ukraine Conflict

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/world/europe/putin-zelensky-ukraine.html

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MOSCOW — The presidents of Russia and Ukraine will meet in Paris next month for long-anticipated talks that could change the contours of the five-year-old conflict in eastern Ukraine whose repercussions have spread worldwide.

The talks, scheduled for Dec. 9, will be the first between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the comedian who won the presidency in April on a pledge to end the fighting with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, and the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin.

At the meeting, officials say, the leaders will aim to make progress in carrying out the terms of a peace deal that was reached four years ago in Minsk, Belarus, but has yet to be implemented. The accord aimed to restore Kiev’s control over separatist-held territory in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Zelensky has conducted troop withdrawals, coordinated with the separatists, at several points along the front lines to build momentum for the talks, even as the Kremlin has seemed to vacillate over whether Mr. Putin was prepared to engage.

The conflict, which has claimed more than 13,000 lives, began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014, after pro-European protests in Kiev toppled Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president.

Since then, Ukraine has become the biggest flash point in the broader conflict between Moscow and the West, triggering European and American sanctions against Russia and rippling into the impeachment hearings playing out in Washington.

Mr. Zelensky will face pressure on multiple fronts as he goes into the talks. His domestic critics claim he is prepared to sell out Ukrainian interests to make peace with Mr. Putin, who has fomented the separatist conflict.

At the same time, Mr. Zelensky’s negotiating position is hobbled by the impeachment spectacle, with has exposed new uncertainties about America’s longstanding support for Ukraine. At least nine key American officials who had a hand in Ukraine policy have either resigned or become distanced from the Trump administration since last spring.

Western officials have played down expectations for the Paris meeting, noting that Kiev and Moscow are hemmed in by domestic politics. Still, since it appeared uncertain recently that Mr. Putin was even prepared to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart, the scheduling of talks has, in itself, seemed to augur some incremental progress.

The two leaders will be joined by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France. In a statement, Mr. Macron's office cited “major progress since the summer in negotiations for a settlement.”

Summit meetings between the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany took place five times under Mr. Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, but the last one was in 2016.

The talks will seek to produce “a kind of road map — how to implement everything written in the text of the Minsk agreement,” Bohdan Yaremenko, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Ukrainian Parliament and a Zelensky ally, said in an interview last week.

The Minsk agreement, hammered out over 16 hours of talks in February 2015, included promises that a special legal status would be granted to Ukraine’s eastern regions and that local elections would be held. The provisions have remained unimplemented because they proved to be deeply contentious on both sides.