President Vladimir Putin today asked Russia's upper house to revoke the right it had granted him to order a military intervention in Ukraine in defence of Russian-speakers there.
The step seemed certain to be welcomed by the West as a sign that Moscow was ready to help engineer a settlement in Ukraine's largely Russian-speaking east, where a pro-Russian uprising against Kiev began in April.
Mr Putin’s spokesman said the move was aimed at assisting fledgling peace talks, which began yesterday, to end the conflict.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko called it a "first practical step" following Putin's statement of support last weekend for Mr Poroshenko's peace plan for eastern Ukraine.
Mr Putin's chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, said Russia now expected Kiev to respond with measures of its own, without specifying what these should be.
In the March 1st resolution, the Federation Council had granted Mr Putin the right to “use the Russian Federation’s Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine until the social and political situation in that country normalises”.
That resolution, together with Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, helped push East-West relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War and led the United States and Europe to impose sanctions on Moscow.
European Union foreign ministers yesterday held out the prospect of further sanctions if Russia did not do more to support a peace process in eastern Ukraine, and also asked it to revoke the March 1st resolution.
Since then, rebels in eastern Ukraine have agreed to a temporary ceasefire to give time for peace talks in a forum where Russia is represented alongside the Kiev government and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Mr Poroshenko’s welcome for Mr Putin’s move was tempered by his announcement that one Ukrainian serviceman had been killed and seven others wounded in what he said were eight ceasefire violations by rebels overnight.
Russia has already pulled back tens of thousands of troops that it had moved close to border earlier in the crisis, adding to Western fears that it was ready to follow its forcible annexation of majority-Russian Crimea with intervention in its ex-Soviet neighbour.
Those troops had also provided an unspoken threat to support the well-equipped but sometimes poorly coordinated rebels in eastern Ukraine against government forces trying to wrest back the towns and administration buildings they had seized.
Russia’s foreign ministry today accused the EU of taking a biased view of the crisis in Ukraine. It said the EU had conveniently ignored the fact that Kiev’s military action had caused the deaths of tens of children and driven thousands of civilians to continue to seek refuge on Russian territory.
On Friday, Mr Poroshenko is set to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union - the very pact that former president Viktor Yanukovich rejected in January under heavy pressure from Russia, which had wanted Ukraine's 45 million people to join its own Eurasian Economic Union.
Russia is certain to respond by raising trade barriers to Ukrainian exports in order to protect its markets, adding further strain to an economic relationship already badly soured by Ukraine’s refusal to accept an increase in the price of Russian gas, imposed after Yanukovich was toppled.
Reuters