Useful Satisfaction ≈ No Progress

So, the Normandy Four meetings held on Monday are hailed as having been both useful and satisfactory.  Does that equal ‘success’?  Well, only if you consider success to mean nothing has changed and no progress has been made. 

TASS has produced 5 separate stories on this today, none of which indicate that anything happened which could be interpreted as progress, other than a restatement of basic principles.  I suppose that could be said to be better than any retrenchment from earlier stated positions, but it doesn’t mean that anything positive is going to happen.  Anything at all, at least within the foreseeable future.

All that is needed of course, and what will eventually happen, is for Ukraine to kiss Donbass goodbye and redraw its own borders along the declared borders of the new republics.

I suggest that no such thing is yet on the cards and as a result more people are going to die every day on either side of those borders.  Mainly Donbass civilians who are even now constantly under Kiev army shelling and also Kiev soldiers who don’t seem to know how to handle live munitions or remember where they buried land-mines (so much for US/NATO advisory assistance).

“Ceasefire in Donbass should be synchronized with political reforms in Ukraine — Putin”