MINSK, Belarus — The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany will gather here late Wednesday to try to negotiate a peace agreement for Ukraine, hoping to quiet a year-old conflict that has set off a major power confrontation and that threatens to destabilize the European continent.
In announcing that President François Hollande of France would travel to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, his office said in a statement that he and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, hoped to “try everything” to forge a lasting agreement.
Negotiations on what exactly the leaders would discuss continued even as the various governments announced that their leaders were heading to Minsk. The talks are based on a 12-point peace agreement called the Minsk Protocol, signed here in September but violated almost immediately.
A group of negotiators from Russia and Ukraine, as well as from the separatist strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk, were trying to make the final arrangements for a cease-fire and the size of a demilitarized zone, according to a Ukrainian diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the talks.
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Moscow wants the means to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, and preferably the European Union as well. But since the revolution fomented by Ukrainians last February was partially inspired by the demand to draw closer to Europe, and hundreds of soldiers have died defending that goal, the question is whether Mr. Poroshenko can sell it.
“The question is not what the Russians want, but what the Ukrainians can accept,” said Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“The strategy is to keep Crimea Russian and to keep eastern Ukraine as a center of resistance to the nationalist, anti-Russian tendencies which now prevail in Kiev,” he said. “The game is a long one — it will not end this month, nor this year.”
Rick Lyman reported from Kharkiv, Ukraine.
