Belarus to host four-nation Ukraine peace meeting Tuesday

The foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany will meet in Belarus next week to try to push Ukraine’s stalled peace process forward, Paris announced Friday.
Next Tuesday’s meeting in the capital Minsk will “take stock of what was done in Berlin on October 19” when the leaders of the four countries met, said French foreign ministry deputy spokesman Alexandre Giorgini.
“We have to establish a roadmap and examine the process together,” he told reporters.
At the Berlin meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko said they were aiming to resolve an impasse on the conflict by the end of November, vowing to put together a roadmap for applying the frayed 2015 Minsk peace accords.
Neither the Ukrainian government nor the pro-Russian rebels waging an insurgency in the country’s east have fully implemented the agreements — designed to bring an end to a conflict that has claimed 10,000 lives since 2014 — and low-level fighting continues.
Russia, which annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, is backing the pro-Moscow insurgency, though Moscow denies accusations that it has sent troops and weaponry over the border.
US President Barack Obama, along with five European leaders, vowed earlier this month to keep up sanctions against Russia over the conflict.
The election of Donald Trump — who has vowed to normalise ties with Russia — has raised trepidation in Kiev that Washington may change course on the conflict, though Poroshenko insisted Tuesday that he was confident of continuing US support.