Juncker, Poroshenko to discuss Ukraine's troubled truce

(BRUSSELS) - European Commission chief Jean Claude Juncker will hold talks in Brussels next week with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the tattered ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, the EU said Friday.

Juncker will meet with Poroshenko next Thursday to discuss "implementation of the Minsk agreement", Commission spokeswoman Annika Breidthardt told reporters.

An escalation in fighting is threatening a peace deal signed in February in the Belarus capital of Minsk between the pro-Western Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists.

The Brussels talks will follow meetings Poroshenko will have on Monday in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who were both present at the Minsk agreement's signing.

President Vladimir Putin -- who persistently denies any Kremlin involvement in the crisis and calls Russian soldiers discovered in the war zone "volunteers" -- has been notably omitted from the round of meetings.

The EU's External Action Service said August 11 that mounting attacks in government-held areas of eastern Ukraine violated "the spirit and the letter of the Minsk agreements, without explicitly blaming pro-Russian separatists.

Some Kiev politicians accuse Moscow of planning a new rebel offensive that could rattle the Ukrainian leadership enough to reverse its plans to implement a landmark trade treaty with the European Union at the start of next year.

Russia has already threatened to expand its list of banned Ukrainian food imports should the agreement go into effect.

Yet Poroshenko has said that he and Juncker had agreed by telephone that the "free trade zone should be strengthened as of January 1."

The United Nations believes the conflict -- Europe's deadliest since the 1990s wars in the Balkans -- has killed more than 6,800 people and driven 1.4 million from their homes.