The situation in eastern Ukraine is extremely precarious, as yesterday Ukrainian military forces were reported to take positions near Slavyansk.
Today it became known that three pro-Russian separatists were killed overnight in a shootout in Mariupol, Ukraine.
As Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov posted in Facebook,” three intruders were killed, 13 injured and 63 arrested”.
The attack of 300 men was repelled and there were no casualties among the forces of the Interior Ministry, including the National Guard Base.
All hope for the prevention of a civil war now lies now lies in today’s meeting between the foreign ministers of Russia, Ukraine, USA and the head of EU diplomacy in Geneva.
“The participants in the Geneva meeting have no right to fail”, said the German Foreign Minister Frank -Walter Steinmeier, indicating that a first agreement is imperative.
This view is not shared by Washington, which does not expect to make significant progress with Russia during the meeting, according to the announcements of U.S. officials on Wednesday.
More specifically, the officials said that it is reasonable to expect new sanctions against Moscow, if there is no progress in the meeting.
At the same time, however, that these statements were made, the ambassadors of Western countries with their Russian counterpart exchanged accusations in the Security Council during the presentation of the UN report on human rights in Ukraine. Moscow, through its ambassador Vitaly Churkin, characterized the report biased and claimed it does not correctly reflect the situation of the Russian-speaking population. He also stressed that Ukraine faces “the danger of a real civil war”, saying Kiev authorities should engage in dialogue with the separatists.

Russian journalist were released
The Ukrainian army freed the Russian journalists of the TV channel Russia TV who had been detained since Tuesday night in southeastern Ukraine. The journalists were released after an intervention by the Russian embassy in Kiev, that requested explanations from the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the arrest of the reporters.