By Carol Castiel, Feb. 6, 2015, VoaNews.com

WASHINGTON— As the United States weighs arming Ukraine’s military to bolster its fight against Russia-backed separatists, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande have begun talks in Moscow to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

VOA’s Carol Castiel probed the issue with two experts. Steven Pifer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. William Pomeranz is Deputy Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a professor of Russian law at Georgetown University.

Castiel: Will sending lethal aid to Ukraine effectively force Russian President Vladimir Putin to escalate the Kremlin’s involvement in the conflict?

Pifer: “The risks of U.S. inaction are greater than the risks of action. What’s going on now in Eastern Ukraine is virtual warfare in places like Donetsk and Debaltseve. But escalation by the Kremlin poses a dilemma [for them] in that it would make this much more a Russian military conflict as opposed to the fiction they try to maintain that its mainly [fueled by] separatists.