Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier have welcomed a meeting of the contact group for Ukraine that took place in Minsk on Thursday.
“The ministers welcomed the resumption of the work of the contact group for settling the crisis attended by representatives of Kyiv and the southeast and facilitated by the OSCE and Russia,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement available on its website.
Lavrov and Steinmeier emphasized “the importance of the implementation of measures that should practically lead to stopping the fighting in southeastern Ukraine, ensuring safe conditions for investigating the causes of the Malaysian Boeing crash, and starting an inclusive dialogue between the conflicting parties based on the April 17 Geneva statement and the July 2 Berlin declaration. Further contacts between Kyiv and the southeast of Ukraine in the contact group format should be focused precisely on this,” the statement says.
Lavrov and Steinmeier were “contented to note the deployment of an OSCE monitoring mission at the Donetsk and Gukovo checkpoints at the Russian-Ukrainian border in response to Russia’s invitation,” it said.
The two also agreed on the need to resolve humanitarian problems in Ukraine by using the UN and other international organizations’ instruments, it said.
“Lavrov emphasized that it is unacceptable to wind down the investigations into the tragedies in Odesa, Luhansk, and Mariupol in the course of the so-called antiterrorist operation conducted by Kyiv, the ‘Maidan sniper case’ in February this year, and other violations of international and humanitarian law,” it said.
Steinmeier assured Lavrov that Germany would attach significance to these matters.
