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Lavrov calls for additional steps to facilitate implementation of Minsk accords

Russia's top diplomat believes that the preparations for the new Normandy Four meeting will be viable only after implementing the previous agreements

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Alexander Shcherbak/TASS

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

© Alexander Shcherbak/TASS

MOSCOW, August 20. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called for taking additional steps to make progress in implementing the Minsk agreements.

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He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron had commented on the Normandy format summit issue on Monday. "President Putin said that we are ready to meet in any format, if there are specific results. President Macron confirmed that he was not a proponent of a meeting for the sake of a meeting. Later on, we discussed the need to first implement what the Normandy Four leaders agreed on in Berlin almost three years ago, in October 2016," Russia’s top diplomat told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday answering a question from TASS.

He noted that this concerns disengagement of manpower and material in three areas of the Donbass region, specifically, near Stanitsa Luganskaya, Petrovskoye and Zolotoye. "This agreement was sabotaged by the Poroshenko regime from the very beginning to the last days of that regime. The Contact Group now seems to have made progress in the disengagement of forces at Stanitsa Luganskaya. However, it is essential to restore the status quo in the two remaining areas, because the Ukrainian armed forces, which had been withdrawn from there, returned there at the end of last year-at the beginning of this year," Lavrov went on to say.

According to the minister, another task is to commit to paper the so-called Steinmeier formula regarding the procedure of enactment of the special status law.

"All that was agreed on in detail. Now we suggest committing it to paper legally both in the Normandy format and in the Contact Group," Russia’s top diplomat stressed. "Therefore, the outcome of the summit will be implemented, and we will be able to talk about the next steps that should be taken."

"Of course, all that will require preparatory work. The leaders’ foreign policy aides met in Paris last month. The meeting was useful, and we pointed to that at the talks with our French counterparts yesterday. However, we need to prepare additional steps, which will help accelerate the implementation of the Minsk agreements," Lavrov said.

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