MINSK, July 7. /TASS/. The Contact Group for settling the armed civil conflict in southeastern Ukraine and its four working subgroups meet in Minsk on Tuesday again after a two-week interval.
The agenda of the Minsk consultations unfortunately remains unchanged from meeting to another since there is no real progress on the problems under discussion, Denis Pushilin, the plenipotentiary representative of self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said on the eve of the Tuesday consultations.
"There’s no possibility to intensify the talks for the time being," he said at a roundtable conference at TASS headquarters. "There are some shifts but they fall short of what’s needed for a full-scale truce."
During the two weeks after the previous meeting, the Kiev government managed to draft unilaterally a blueprint of the constitutional reform and submitted it to the Verkhovna Rada. The document is destined to lay the groundwork for a political settlement in Donbass under provisions of the September 2014 and February 2015 Minsk accords.
President Pyotr Poroshenko alleged after it that Ukraine had fulfilled all of its the obligations undersigned in the format of the Minsk process but the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics did not agree with it and accused Kiev of imitating commitment to the Minsk accords.
Simultaneously, authorities in the two republics declared elections on their territories that would be held separately from the local elections in the rest of Ukraine.
Alexei Chesnokov, the director of the Center for Political Analysis of Current Politics believes that Kiev is de facto pushing Donbass out of the Ukrainian constitutional space.
"If the Ukrainian ruling class has no plans to speak to the two self-proclaimed republics, the chances of its success of incorporating Donbass (in Ukraine) on whatever conditions are too slim," he said. "The farther Kiev pushes through with a constitutional process of its own, the fewer the chances that Donbass will manage to fit itself into it.".