From Democracy Digest

French President Emmanuel Macron will seek to persuade his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin next week to resume peace talks with Ukraine after its new president offered an olive branch, a French official said on Tuesday, Reuters reports (HT: FDD).

Ukraine’s coherence as a country and its capacity to one day reincorporate the occupied regions under Russian control depend on the ability of its eastern regions to rebound from their economic and political decline, argues Melinda Haring, Editor of the Atlantic Council’s Ukraine Alert blog and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The larger project in Ukraine is to increase levels of trust in a society where that precious commodity is in short supply, she writes for Foreign Affairs. Ukraine’s citizens have the lowest levels of trust in their government worldwide, but people do have faith in their neighbors, volunteers, the church, and the armed forces. The problem is especially acute in the Donbas. Providing opportunities for people in eastern Ukraine to work together can help address the problem, adds Haring, a former Penn Kemble fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.