The next meeting will be held via video-conference.
The regular meeting of the contact group on settlement of the situation in the East of Ukraine will be held on Wednesday in a videoconference mode. The main event of the last two weeks after the last meeting in Minsk was the regular exchange of prisoners. On Thursday last week, following the agreements reached in the framework of the contact group, 34 people were released: 20 were returned to Kiev, 14 returned to Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).
This release – already the second after the December 2019 Summit of the “Norman Quartet”, when the recommendation to exchange “all for all” was fixed – did not completely solve the problem. Both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and representatives of the DPR and LNR said that they would continue to work for the release of all those held as a result of the conflict. A representative of the DPR, Daria Morozova, said that the republic set a goal to bring home about 100 more people. Russian Ambassador Boris Gryzlov said that the parties had agreed to discuss further actions on exchange at the next meeting of the contact group.
Heidi Grau, Special Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office in the Contact Group, also welcomed the exchange, expressing the hope that it would “serve to build confidence between the parties in the implementation of other aspects of the Minsk agreements.
However, the outcome of the Monday-Tuesday sub-working group talks has so far fallen short of those hopes. The subgroup on security has again failed to agree on any of the issues that have been on its agenda since the December summit of the Norman Quartet. According to Aleksei Nikonorov, a representative of the NRC, the republics have proposed two areas for discussion this time, but no consensus has been reached.
“The position of the Ukrainian side shows that it does not intend to agree on any of the proposed sections, as there is not a single section among them, and this complicates not only the negotiation process as a whole, but also the coordination of new sections for the separation of forces and means”, – he said.
It was not possible to agree on the text of the addendum to the framework decision on the separation of forces of 2016, said the representative of DPR.
The work of the humanitarian subgroup was also ineffective. As reported by a representative of the LPR Olga Kobtseva, – “The agenda was the same: reaching an agreement on exchange, opening (additional) checkpoints, but, “unfortunately, we could not achieve a constructive solution with the Ukrainian side”, – she said.