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Kiev fails to fulfil Minsk agreements — LPR republic

LPR negotiator in the Contact Group says there is hope to persuade Ukraine to return to the logic of the adopted document and cancel the documents contradicting the Minsk agreements

MOSCOW, April 1. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) drew attention on Wednesday to the non-fulfilment by Kiev of the Minsk agreements.

"After a long interval we have finally returned to the dialogue," LPR negotiator Vladislav Deinego said at a videoconference of the Contact Group on the east Ukrainian conflict settlement. "There is the hope that we’ll persuade Ukraine to return to the logic of the adopted [in Minsk] document and cancel the documents contradicting the set of measures to implement the Minsk agreements," the LuhanskInformCenter agency quotes him as saying.

Deinego said that the issue of the formation of subgroups within the Contact Group was a central topic on the talks agenda. "We hope that working groups will be formed in the coming days and start to work in their spheres," he said.

The LPR negotiator reiterated at the videoconference that "the Ukrainian side, in violation of the set of measures, has adopted a number of documents that have actually blocked the law on the special status of Donbas.

On March 30, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) said they decided to set up a commission on reforming Ukraine’s constitution and offered head of the Ukrainian constitutional commission Volodymyr Groysman to establish a joint working group. "In line with article 11 of the complex of measures on the implementation of the Minsk agreements of February 12, 2015, Ukraine is to carry out a constitutional reform, with decentralisation as a key element of such reform," DPR and LPR representatives in the Contact Group on Ukraine, Denis Pushilin and Vladislav Deinego, said in a joint statement.

"The republics are setting up a commission that will be tasked to implement the provision of the complex of measures concerning reforms of the Ukrainian constitution and to align the republics’ constitutional laws," the statement said. "We offer head of Ukraine’s constitutional commission Volodymyr Groysman to set up a joint working group."

Minsk agreements

Marathon talks between the Normandy Four leaders — Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko — in Minsk on February 12 yielded a package of agreements, which in particular envisaged ceasefire between the Ukrainian conflicting sides starting from midnight on February 15.

Concurrently, the Belarusian capital hosted a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine involving Ukraine’s ex-president Leonid Kuchma, Kiev’s special representative for humanitarian issues Viktor Medvedchuk, the leaders of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR republics Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky, and Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov and OSCE’s envoy Heidi Tagliavini, both acting as mediators.

As a result, a package of measures was adopted to implement the Minsk agreements. A separate provision of the document binds to carry out a constitutional reform in Ukraine by the end of 2015. The key element of this reform is to be decentralisation.