Merkel, Abe discuss Ukraine

So Putin has admitted planning the invasion of Crimea before the referendum.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31796226

How much longer before he admits arming the eastern rebels? Sounds like fair game to me for the US to arm Kiev.

See the double standard here. You can visit China seven times more than Japan but you can't tell the Chinese to join in your pursuit of sanctions again Putin. You can easily tell Japan to sanction Putin though. Because you are afraid to tell the truth to China because of they won't buy your cars. I wish Japan can choose what is best for it instead of following this double standard message. I don't dispute Ukraine but all must be called to play a part in building a better world. Not give China the easier pass.

@change China is also a stinker that wouldn't care about human rights in a million years. The hope is that Japan is better than this. Russia is sitting on four Japanese islands and won't return them until the end of time, after all.

Another Central/Eastern European war that will run and run. Funzo and Meerkat talking about it won't change that.

The war is basically over.

How naive. This so-called ceasefire won't hold and then the rebels will use that as a pretext to go after their primary targets once again, backed by their master in Moscow of course. And now that he's admitted engineering the annexation of Crimea, how long before Putin accepts the blame for the rebellion in the rest of Ukraine? I said you couldn't trust that gangster.

And now that he's admitted engineering the annexation of Crimea

And before him Obama admitted that US "played a role" in (polite diplomatic for "instigated") the coup d"etat at Kiev. Now, after a year since Crimea returned to Russia, ordinary Crimeans are more then happy, particularly when compare their present life with what is going on at Ukraine.

This so-called ceasefire won't hold

Here I agree with you, the ceasefire won't hold for a long time. The Kiev regime now assembling all its remaining forces, and in April - May it will try again to turn the tide, just as Hitler did at Ardennes in 1944. The result will be the same.