The Thursday Geneva “joint statement” was met with a lot of fanfare as a path out of the endless escalation of acrimony in eastern Ukraine, but it is now apparent that the pact hasn’t amounted to much at all.
The problems with the Geneva Accord are two-fold: the eastern protesters weren’t a party to the deal, and therefore don’t feel obliged to abide by it, and the Ukrainian interim government, which was a party to it, has interpreted it as only applying to the eastern protesters.
The call to disarm various militias in the country is thus going totally unheeded, as the eastern protesters have no intention of disarming unilaterally in the midst of an invasion, and the interim government isn’t even attempting to disarm anyone else, notably letting the neo-Nazi Right Sector continue its operations with impunity, including an apparent attack on eastern protesters today in Slovyansk.
Indeed, at this point it seems the only material result of the deal is for Russia to complain about Ukraine not abiding by it, and the United States blaming Russia for the eastern protesters not abiding by it. Those two didn’t really need an excuse to trade condemnation, but that and a trip to Geneva is all they got out of the talks.
