Kiev's pro-Western leaders hope to hold truce talks today with pro-Russian separatists despite the rebels' vow to push their latest offensive in eastern Ukraine if the negotiations should fail.
The urgent new round of negotiations in Minsk that had been agreed for yesterday under pressure from European envoys was postponed due to disagreements over who should represent the rebel camp.
Kiev said it expected to send its envoy, former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, to Minsk today for the talks -- formally backed by the Kremlin -- aimed at reinforcing a tattered September truce.
"We expect to sign a document that reinforces the Minsk Memorandum (of September) and the peace plan of presidents (Petro) Poroshenko and (Vladimir) Putin," Kuchma told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
"Our main goal is to ensure that the (September) agreement is implemented," he told Ukrainian reporters earlier of the talks mediated by European and Russian envoys.
Plans for the negotiations in the Belarussian capital Minsk were announced on Thursday, raising hopes of dialogue after the collapse of a September truce in the nine-month war that has killed more than 5,100 people, according to the United Nations.
Ukraine is insisting on the presence of Donetsk insurgency commander Alexander Zakharchenko and leader of the separatist Lugansk region Igor Plotnitsky at the talks, rather than their representatives, a Ukrainian diplomatic spokesman told AFP.
The insurgents last week pulled out of peace talks and announced the start of an offensive designed to expand their control over a much broader swathe of the industrial southeast.
They also said yesterday they would not halt their actions in restive areas if the talks failed.
"Should the negotiations collapse... The Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics reserve the right to pursue their offensive until the entire Donetsk and Lugansk regions are freed" of Ukrainian troops, the rebel regions' main negotiators said in a joint statement.
The insurgents' statement said the fighters were ready to pull back their heavy weapons from the frontline as long as Ukrainian forces did the same.
But they also stressed that the new border outlining rebel-run regions should run along the current front, giving them an area around 500 square kilometres greater than lines agreed in September.
The latest violence has alarmed Ukraine's Western allies, with US Secretary of State John Kerry announcing plans to express his support for the war-torn nation during talks in Kiev on Thursday with Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
