MOSCOW, May 22. /TASS/. A second round of meetings of all the four subgroups of the Contact Group for settling the armed civil conflict in eastern Ukraine will be held in Minsk on June, the press service of the plenipotentiary representative of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin, said on Friday.
The Contact Group as such will meet in session after the subgroups' meetings are over, he said.
"The next cycle of meetings of subgroups is synchronized and all the four subgroups are expected to meet simultaneously on June 2," the Donetsk News Agency quoted him. "The contact group will meet on the same day."
As he spoke about Friday’s meeting of the subgroup in charge of political issues, he said it had not managed to attain consensus right away at the first meeting.
"Still the scope of problems is clear anyway," Pushilin said. "The subgroups will be taking any decisions only on the basis of consensus."
"We discussed the problem of elections in Donbass and there were knotty positions that remained unresolved but we’ll continue to discuss them," he said.
"Work is proceeding slowly but still there’s some progress and any of these steps move us forwards," Pushilin said.
Vladislav Deinego, the plenipotentiary representative of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic said a schedule of forthcoming contacts had been coordinated in the rough for a month ahead. According to it, three rounds of talks would be held in June.
"The dynamics of activity in all the four subgroups is quite positive," he said. "We’ve set ourselves a task to work systemically."
"We’re now spelling out the details of problems because it’s much easier to reach consensus when a problem has been specified in detail," Deinego said. "One group has done more and another group has done less but each meeting takes us a step ahead."
Heidi Tagliavini, the plenipotentiary representative of the European security organization OSCE confirmed on the same day that all the four subgroups would meet on June 2.
She said she hoped their work would help fulfill the Minsk accords, adding that participants in the talks were still in the process of working out procedural mechanisms.
Tagliavini said the subgroups were doing their job fruitfully. They were set up on May 6 for the purpose of intensifying the peace process and efforts to fulfill several aspects of the Minsk accords.
The subgroups in charge of security, economic and humanitarian problems met on May 14 and May 19.