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Kiev confirms Contact Group meeting on Wednesday

On Monday, Ukraine's president put forward an initiative to convene an emergency session of the Contact Group over a deteriorating situation around Avdeyevka, a settlement in Donbass

KIEV, January 31. /TASS/. Representatives of the Contact Group for the settlement in Donbass will get together in the Belarusian capital on Wednesday, February 1, as scheduled, a spokesperson for Kiev’s envoy to the Contact Group Leonid Kuchma told Tass on Tuesday.

"A meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group will be held in Minsk tomorrow," Darya Olifer said without elaborating.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko put forward an initiative to convene an emergency session of the Contact Group over a deteriorating situation around Avdeyevka, a settlement in Donbass. The self-proclaimed republics, for their part, said this initiative was senseless ahead of the already planned meeting in Minsk.

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Expert says escalation in Donbass linked to beginning of new Ukraine talks

According to the defense ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, late on Sunday Kiev troops attacked the republic near the settlements of Avdeyevka and Yasinovataya, but were rebuffed and had to return to their positions.

The DPR says it stopped shelling positions of the Ukrainian armed forces early on Tuesday, but shelling from Kiev troops continues. Meanwhile, Kiev representatives accuse militias of shelling their positions and territories in Donbass.

On December 21, the parties to the Contact Group for settling the armed civil conflict in eastern Ukraine made a yet another, tenth, attempt to reach a ceasefire. However, the security situation in Donbass has not visibly improved, with Ukrainian troops continuing to shell territories of the self-proclaimed republics.

The Package of Measures to fulfil the September 2014 Minsk agreements, known as Minsk-2, that was signed in Minsk on February 12, 2015, envisaged a ceasefire regime between Ukrainian government forces and people’s militias in the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Lugansk (DPR and LPR) starting from February 15, 2015 and a subsequent withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of engagement.

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