Next meeting of contact group for Ukraine planned for next week in Minsk - Kuchma
KYIV. Sept 12 (Interfax) - Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, a participant in the Ukraine-OSCE-Russia trilateral contact group for settling the conflict in Ukraine, says the next round of the group's negotiations is planned for the next week.
"The next round of the meeting is planned in Minsk next week," Kuchma told journalists on the sidelines of the 11th annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) forum in Kyiv on Friday.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday that the next meeting of the contract group for Ukraine would take place in the near future. "There are expectations that the contact group would hold another meeting in the near future, and this is logical," Lukashevich said at a news conference in Moscow on Thursday.
"It is necessary to reach specific agreements on all provisions of the Minsk agreements of September 5. This concerns a very important element that is stipulated there, that is, the continuation of a nationwide inclusive dialogue between Donbas and the Kyiv authorities, the DPR and LPR [the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic] and the Kyiv authorities, and on resolving a number of other issues that need to be formalized as separate documents," Lukashevich said.