Early Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a top-level summit in Minsk, Belarus, has produced a peace plan for war-torn Ukraine. A cease-fire between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists will begin on Sunday, and heavy weapons will be withdrawn from the frontline. The deals, for a cease-fire and longer peace plan, were reached after more than 15 hours of talks involving Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Francois Hollande.
There are plenty of questions about the deal, a major one being whether the separatists will accept it. Putin, Poroshenko, and Merkel and Hollande also announced the deals separately, and "the fact that the leaders used three separate news conferences to announce the accord suggested a lack of unity," notes The New York Times.
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