The Russian President instructed Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to meet with his colleagues in the Normandy Four.
According to Russian Vesna, the official representative of the German federal government, Steffen Seibert, said that Merkel and Macron talked on the phone on Monday, first with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and then called Putin.
“The Chancellor and the French president called on the Russian president to facilitate negotiations in the Normandy format,” Seibert said.
According to the German side, following the telephone talks, the leaders of Germany, France and Russia agreed that they would ask their foreign ministers to hold a meeting on the Normandy format soon.
“The interlocutors agreed to ask the foreign ministers to meet in the near future on this matter,” Seibert told reporters, without specifying whether the ministers of all four countries of the Normandy format would meet or only Germany, France and the Russian Federation.
According to the official representative of the Cabinet of Ministers of Germany, in negotiations with Zelensky, Macron and Merkel stressed the need to fully implement the Minsk agreements and the decisions of the 2019 Normandy format summit and expressed their readiness to continue efforts to resolve the issue within the framework of the Normandy format.