A long waited summit for peace in eastern Ukraine ended with a call for the delay of contentious rebel plans to hold local elections this month and for both sides to begin a promised withdrawal of smaller-caliber weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris. The summit was the first since the leaders worked out a peace deal in Minsk in February.

“We don’t want elections to get held in eastern Ukrainian territories under conditions that would not respect Minsk,” Hollande said. The Minsk deal includes a year-end deadline for Kyiv to recover full control over its border with Russia.

The Ukrainian pullback will take 41 days. “The war will be over when the last piece of the Ukrainian land has been liberated,” Poroshenko said.

Merkel, who described a “positive mood” at the Paris meeting, said after the talks that Putin had “committed to working towards…establishing the conditions that would allow elections to take place according to Minsk, based on Ukrainian law, in a coordinated fashion between the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government.”

But the separatists’ representatives in Donetsk and Luhansk have previously announced they would conduct elections on their own terms on October 18 and November 1, respectively, without the involvement of the Ukrainian government.
The regular regional elections in the rest of the country are scheduled for October 25.