Ukraine: Peace at last?

The current ceasefire in the war in eastern Ukraine, the so-called Minsk-2 agreement, was signed last February, but they never actually ceased firing. At least a thousand more people have been killed in the fighting since then, and on one night last month (Aug. 14) the monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) recorded 175 separate ceasefire violations.

On a visit to Kiev that week, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said that the conflict was "still red-hot" and that he could not see an end to the fighting "any time soon." As late as Sept. 11 Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was condemning Russia's "neo-imperial aggression" in eastern Ukraine, where an estimated 9,000 Russian soldiers are on the ground in support of the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk.

But then the music changed. When the annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) forum opened in Kiev on Sept. 12, Poroshenko announced that the previous night had been the first in the whole conflict with no shelling. "This is not the end of the war," he said, "but instead a change in tactics."

Maybe that's all it is, but if it stops the shooting, that would certainly be a step in the right direction. And by and large the shooting really has stopped in the past two weeks, although there is no sign yet that Russian troops are leaving Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. 

Poroshenko claims that the shift in Russian tactics is merely a switch from military offensives in the east to political attacks intended to destabilize Ukraine "from the inside." He was presumably referring to a grenade attack outside the parliament building in Kiev on Aug. 31 that killed three soldiers and wounded more than one hundred people. But it's very unlikely that...