German Chancellor Angela Merker offered Ukraine 500 million euros in help to rebuild destruction from a Russian-backed war in Ukraine’s east, while President Petro Poroshenko promised her to fulfill his pledge decentralize political power in the nation and ensure language and cultural rights of Russian-speakers.

The hostilities between Ukraine and Russia in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, which began shortly after Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, have killed more than 2,000 people and wounded more than 5,000 people. It has also forced hundreds of thousands from their homes in Ukraine’s two densely populated oblasts, home to more than six million people.