Ukraine’s Meat Grinder Is Back in Business

The one bright spot in the otherwise largely unimplemented February 2015 Minsk peace agreement was a ceasefire that ended full-scale fighting between Ukrainian forces and Moscow-backed, pro-Russian rebels who seized parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on the Ukrainian-Russian border almost two years ago.

The ceasefire took over six months to gain traction, but eventually sharply reduced the casualty rate of a war that has so far killed about 10,000 people, both soldiers and civilians. Exchanges of fire, usually small arms, have never completely ceased, of course.

But heavy fighting has broken out, and continues today, in one small but important segment of the 500 km line of separation between the two sides. There is no clear indication of how the fighting started — whether one of the sides is trying to send a warning to the other, or test their response. It is just as likely as that local sniping gradually and imperceptibly turned into a local battle.

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