Contact group on Ukraine will meet in Minsk in first half of day on Monday - Belarusian Foreign Ministry
MINSK. Sept 1 (Interfax) - The meeting of the three-party contact group (Ukraine-OSCE-Russia) on the settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine will be held in Minsk on Monday and there is currently no official information on the level of representation.
"The meeting of the contact group is scheduled to begin in the first half of the day," the Belarusian Foreign Ministry told Interfax on Monday. The ministry did not specify who will participate in the meeting.
A source close to the negotiation process said "Russia will most likely be represented, like in the previous such meeting, by [Russian] Ambassador [to Ukraine Mikhail] Zurabov and Ukraine will be represented by [Ukraine's former president Leonid] Kuchma." The source said the self proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic will most likely be represented by Andrei Purgin, first deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People's Republic.
"It is possible that the OSCE will not change its representative in this meeting," the source said, adding that the OSCE was represented in the meeting in Minsk on July 31 by Heidi Tagliavini, official representative of the OSCE chairperson-in-office on the situation in Ukraine.
The source also said the meeting of the contact group in Minsk will be held in the Dipservice Hall (Reception Hall) in central Minsk.
The Reception Hall has functioned since the Soviet times. It was previously called the Frunze Residence and U.S. President Bill Clinton visited it in 1994. The Reception Hall went down in Belarusian contemporary history as the first official residence of the first president of Belarus. This is not the first time this government residence becomes an arena for political negotiations. A decision on the political crisis in Belarus was made here on November 21-22, 1996. The reconsolidating parties were then Yegor Stroyev, the head of the upper house of the Russian parliament, Gennady Seleznyov, speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, and Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was then prime minister to Russia. After negotiations in the presence of Russian mediators, the president of Belarus, the parliament speaker and the chairman of the Constitutional Court signed an agreement on the socio-political situation and constitutional reform in the Republic of Belarus at 6:30 a.m. on November 22, 1996.
