MOSCOW, July 30, /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin and his German counterpart Markus Ederer on Wednesday expressed hope that the upcoming meeting of the trilateral contact group on Ukraine would produce positive results.
In a telephone call, Karasin and Ederer “expressed their shared hope that the meeting of representatives of the Kiev authorities and the South-East’s militias with the participation of the OSCE and Russia, to be held in Minsk on July 31, will produce positive results. The main issues on the agenda are a ceasefire, at least in the [Malaysian] plane crash area, and the commencement of dialogue to implement the decisions contained in the Geneva Statement of April 17 and the Berlin Declaration of July 2,” the Foreign Ministry said.
The diplomats stressed “the need for international efforts to stop the bloodshed and begin constructive dialogue between Kiev and the South-East of Ukraine in order to look for mutually acceptable solutions in which both the citizens of Ukraine and the international community are interested”.
They also welcomed the deployment of the first monitors of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) at the Donetsk and Gukovo border-crossing points on the Russian-Ukrainian border on July 29-30.
Karasin and Ederer “noted that no proper conditions have so far been created for the work of international experts at the Malaysian Boeing crash site. Attempts by specialists from Holland and Australia to secure that through bilateral agreements with Kiev proved futile. On the contrary, the Ukrainian army’s determination to use force to take control of the crash site has led to new fighting, which makes it impossible for the necessary work to be done”, the ministry said.
Special attention was paid to the humanitarian catastrophe in the South-East of Ukraine created by the army operation, which has resulted in mass casualties among civilians and forced more people to flee the homes.
“Grigory Karasin stressed that Russia was doing everything possible for their temporary accommodation on its territory. However the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe forces us to urgently raise the question of employing the relevant instruments of the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the OSCE, whose mission has already been deployed in Ukraine, to solve these problems,” the ministry said.