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Normandy Four’s ministerial meeting may be held soon — German diplomat

BERLIN, November 21. /TASS/. A ministerial meeting of the Normandy Quartet on settling the Ukrainian crisis may be held in the near future, Germany’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Martin Schaefer said on Monday.

"I think there may be a meeting of ministers in the foreseeable future," Schaefer said, although adding that he cannot officially confirm this as contacts with three partners - Russia, Ukraine and France - are needed.

The work on the roadmap on implementing the Minsk peace agreements is underway "in a complicated way and slowly," he said. The leaders of Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France agreed at the Berlin meeting on October 20 that the document should be ready within a month.

"Sometimes there are steps forward and sometimes backward," Schaefer said, adding that after the Normandy Quartet summit the ceasefire violations grew. "Although over the past days the situation somehow improved, but one cannot say that we are out of the crisis."

The diplomat stressed that Berlin believes the roadmap will help to overcome the differences during the interpretation of the Minsk agreements in order to have an uncontested plan that the parties to the conflict could accept.