Truce must be respected

Germany and France yesterday demanded that a crumbling Ukraine truce be "fully respected" even as pro-Russian rebels celebrated a battlefield victory in a strategic town and exchanged artillery fire elsewhere with government troops.
"The ceasefire has been violated several times," French President Francois Hollande said in a joint Paris media conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
"It must now be fully respected along the entire frontline."
Merkel added that "we don't have any illusions" about how difficult it would be to get the ceasefire to take hold, but was "even more convinced" that the only solution was a truce that led to a negotiated peace.
French officials said the foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France would meet in Paris next Tuesday to discuss the conflict.
While Merkel and Hollande met, pro-Russian rebels were taking victorious photos of each other in the east Ukrainian town of Debaltseve, a strategic transport hub they overran this week despite the ceasefire coming into force last Sunday.
The town was a graveyard of burnt-out Ukrainian army vehicles, craters and shattered buildings.
Efforts by Ukraine's Western-backed government to halt the violence have so far failed and it has come under criticism for losing key territory.
Around 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers who had been holding Debaltseve were forced to flee Wednesday after the rebels, wielding grenade launchers, poured into it in what Ukraine, the EU and US called a "clear violation" of the ceasefire.
Kiev said 13 troops were killed in the withdrawal and 110 seized by the separatists, with another 31 missing. But the rebels said they found the bodies of 57 soldiers, as well as many abandoned weapons, including 28 tanks. They claimed to have taken hundreds of prisoners.
One rebel official in charge of human rights, Daria Morozova, said an initial exchange of prisoners with the Ukrainian side would take place on Saturday, the Interfax news agency reported.