French, German ministers in Ukraine to revive peace deal

Separatist rebels and government troops are both reporting violations of a cease-fire that was supposed to begin in eastern Ukraine at midnight on Wednesday.

Hours before EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said in his annual State of Union address that EU still doesn’t have enough unity, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted that the European Union lacked the cohesion to undertake major new integration steps.

On Tuesday, pro-Russia leaders announced a unilateral ceasefire after they reported that their forces had come under mortar fire the previous day.

“The presence of Jean-Marc and Frank-Walter here in Kiev is evidence that the Normandy format works, that we must together force Russian Federation to implement the Minsk agreements”, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said at the briefing. “Instead of having more integration, we want to have better integration”, he told reporters.

A ceasefire was launched to coincide with the start of the school year on 1 September.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he also expected both sides to sign an agreement next week to withdraw their troops from the lines of conflict in three hotspots.

“We do not have the necessary authority to take that next big integration step after the vote by Britain and given all we are hearing from other European Union members”, Steinmeier said.

On Thursday, a new report from the United Nations’ human rights division raised its tally of people killed in the conflict to 9,640.

The two sides had earlier agreed to abide by a ceasefire to coincide with the start of the school year on September 1, which failed to stop the fighting.

The 2015 agreement reached between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany in the Belarusian capital of Minsk largely calmed the situation but sporadic clashes have continued on the frontline.