MOSCOW, August 7. /TASS/. The Ukrainian delegation at the Contact Group talks has brought the situation with the withdrawal of weapons to the point of absurdity, envoy of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) to the Contact Group Denis Pushilin said on Friday.
"The last meeting of the security subgroup was very problematic. Ukraine is substantially delaying the whole process to a point where the situation has reached absurdness. The discussion of the withdrawal of weapons went on all day long, with the parties arguing about whether two or four days were needed for the withdrawal. A compromise was found - three days. However, after a telephone call to Kiev they proposed 61 days," the Donetsk news agency quotes him as saying.
According to Pushilin, such a step was unacceptable for Donetsk. "You can imagine the scope of absurdity in this case. In the security subgroup, Kiev’s decision came as a shock to the OSCE, because all of us were ready to sign the document," he noted.
The DPR envoy to the Minsk talks earlier said that the Ukrainian side insisted until the very last moment on keeping its weapons on the parts of the frontline from where artillery bombardments of Donetsk and Gorlovka are carried out.
The last round of talks was held in Minsk at the beginning of the week. A meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine and its four working subgroups was held in the Belarusian capital on August 3. The security subgroup continued talks on August 4, but the parties failed to reach an agreement on the text of the treaty regarding the withdrawal of weapons. After the meeting, Denis Pushilin and envoy of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) Vladislav Deynego said that the talks had been deadlocked as a result of Ukraine’s stance.