What’s behind the renewed fighting in Ukraine? Over the past week, the country’s eastern Donbas region – which has been a hotbed of separatist activity since the start of military hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in early 2014 – has been rocked by new, and intense, clashes between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported rebels. The violence has already ravaged Avdiyivka, a Ukrainian town of some 20,000, and left international observers scrambling to re-impose some sort of ceasefire. The situation, in the words of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, is now “an emergency situation verging on a humanitarian disaster.”
Recriminations for the renewed violence abound. Russian officials have pinned the blame on Ukraine for the current bout of unrest, condemning Kyiv’s “provocative actions” and suggesting that Poroshenko is using the conflict as a way of recapturing the attention of the West. The Ukrainian government, for its part, has called the spike in hostilities “a clear indication of Russia’s continued blatant disregard of its commitments under the Minsk agreements” – the troubled ceasefire accord concluded between Kyiv and Moscow back in February 2015.
