Minsk - The next meeting of the three-party contact group on the settlement of the situation in Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine-OSCE format is expected to be held in Minsk on Friday, Sep. 19, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry told Interfax.
“Such a meeting is planned,” a Foreign Ministry said. At the same time, he said the venue and time of the meeting are currently unknown.
The Russian embassy in Minsk told Interfax: “We currently have no information that Russian official Mikhail Zurabov is arriving in Minsk tomorrow.”
At the same time, according to Olena Purhina, deputy first prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic Andriy Purhin, the first deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, left for Minsk on Thursday, Sep. 19, allegedly to hold the next Minsk meeting.
During negotiations involving representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in Minsk on Sep. 5, participants in the Ukraine-Russia-EU contact group signed a protocol on immediate ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. The ceasefire regime took effect on the same day at 6 p.m.
The purpose of the document is to implement Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s peace plan and the initiatives proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to the protocol, the parties agreed to ensure an immediate bilateral ceasefire, OSCE monitoring of the ceasefire, immediate release of all POWs, amnesty of the participants in the events in eastern Ukraine, measures to improve the humanitarian situation, and also the adoption of a law on the special status of some regions of Donbas.
Among the negotiation participants were OSCE official Heidi Tagliavini, Ukraine’s second president Leonid Kuchma, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov, and representatives of the self-proclaimed republics (the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Prime Minister Oleksandr Zakharchenko, the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Purhin, and Luhansk People’s Republic’s Prime Minister Ihor Plotnytsky).
