GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel said today she “hadn’t given up” on a summit with Russian and Ukrainian leaders to discuss a resolution to the civil war in Ukraine.

She spoke a day after the UN security council condemned the shelling of a bus in Volnakhava in the Donetsk region that killed 11 people and injured 17 on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for the Donetsk regional administration, which is governed by anti-fascist separatists battling the right-wing regime in Kiev, said the attack took place at a checkpoint staffed by Ukrainian government troops.

The security council called for an “objective investigation” into the massacre and reminded all parties in the civil war “of the need for strict observation of the Minsk protocol” which sought to establish a ceasefire.

Plans for a summit in Kazakhstan between Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine were called off earlier in the week after foreign ministers said that ceasefire efforts were not yet being taken seriously enough.

“We’re not there yet but we are working on it with all our energy,” Ms Merkel said.

But relations between Moscow and Berlin have deteriorated further in the past week due to the German chancellor’s refusal to comment on outrageous remarks made by Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on German TV last week.

He claimed that “all of us remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany” in the second world war — a comment likely to increase panic among Ukrainian progressives concerned by the Kiev regime’s close links to far-right organisations that glorify nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists murdered thousands of communists, Poles and Jews in World War II.

Challenged by Moscow to distance herself from Mr Yatsenyuk, Ms Merkel’s office said it would not comment on his statement but added that it did not question Germany’s responsibility for the genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union.

Berlin has been silent on the political persecution of the Ukrainian left.

The Communist Party of Ukraine said lawyers had filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights this week concerning what it said was the illegal imprisonment of two of its members from Dneprodzerzhinsk, Dmitri Timofeev and S Tkachenko.

pic: Armin Kuebelbeck/Creative Commons