From the Center for European Reform, this is the CER podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the CER podcast.

My name is Sophia Beshe.

I'm a research fellow here at the Center for European Reform.

And today I want to talk about Ukraine. A couple of weeks ago, the Russian

President Vladimir Putin got quite a lot of attention when he suggested a UN peacekeeping force for the

Dunbass region in eastern Ukraine. And his proposal has been criticized by many as insincere.

There have been suggestions that Putin is not actually serious and trying to find a way out of the

Ukraine conflict. I want to examine the situation today with Luigi Scatzieri, who is a research fellow at the

CR and has published previously on the conflict. Luigi, give us the overview. What is happening in Ukraine

right now? Well, what we have at the moment is a frozen conflict that occasionally flares up,

and the implementation of the Minsk Agreement of February 2015, which remains the only existing

framework to address the crisis, is completely stuck. We still have heavy weapons on the front line,

no ceasefire has ever taken hold, and the political track

is essentially frozen too.

So when you say the political track is frozen, is stuck, what does that mean? Why?

Well, to simplify the situation, the two sides have aims which are completely irreconcilable.

So Ukraine would ideally like to simply reabsorbed the Dombas and perhaps grant the region

a degree of local autonomy, whereas Moscow would ideally want the region to have extensive autonomy

in order to maintain a veto over Ukraine's foreign policy orientation and therefore prevent its integration

with NATO and the European Union.

The paradoxical thing about the current situation is that in a sense the status quo is acceptable

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