War averted for now

'This is a glimmer of hope, no more no less' Angela Merkel said about the ceasefire in Ukraine agreed to in Minsk. Both the Germans and the Russians know the cost of war, and did what they could to diffuse a confrontation that had deep historical roots. Ukrainians are haunted by the memory of Stalin's collectivisation which lead to starvation that killed seven million people, while Russians remembered the Ukrainians who sided with the Germans during the Great Patriotic War. Stalin placed millions of Russians in the industrial Eastern region of Ukraine to replace the native Ukrainian workforce that was killed or deported to Siberia. For these Russians Russia remained their homeland, and their loyalty is to this day to Russia not to Ukraine. They don't trust the bankrupt Ukrainian government, noted for its corruption, in which the pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, was driven from power by forces that wanted Ukraine to join the EU and distance itself from Russia. To Putin, whose aim is to reassert Russia as a great world power, the defection of Ukraine was an attack on Russian hegemony. To exacerbate things, Ukraine is a divided country, in which Ukrainian of the West look down on, despise the Ukrainians of the East, a relic of the division of the country between the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires. All this made for a dangerous mixture that could have erupted into a major conflict between East and West, and if the ceasefire doesn't hold, and the differences that simmer on the ground are not resolved, may yet erupt. But for the time being the sides, under great pressure from Angela Merkel, helped by Francois Hollande, agreed to talk rather than fight.