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Lavrov: Normandy Quartet’s decisions made in Paris should not remain on paper

Certain progress was achieved in settling the intra-Ukrainian crisis, Russia's acting foreign minister noted

© Sergei Karpukhin/TASS

MOSCOW, January 17. /TASS/. Decisions made by the Normandy Quartet summit in Paris should not remain a sheet of paper, contrary to what happened during the rule of Ukraine’s former president Pyotr Poroshenko, Russia’s acting Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference devoted to the performance of Russian diplomacy in 2019.

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"Certain progress was achieved in settling the intra-Ukrainian crisis. After a three-year pause there was a summit of the Normandy Quartet, when the new leadership in Kiev managed to take certain steps to implement decisions made by the previous summits," Lavrov said. "We expect that the decisions made in Paris in December will allow for moving forward along the road of implementing the Minsk package of measures. But, of course, these decisions should not remain a sheet of paper, contrary to what we saw under the Poroshenko regime."

The leaders of Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France gathered in Paris for a Normandy summit on December 9. It was agreed that prisoners of war, sometimes referred to as ‘held persons’ should be exchanged by the Donbass republics and Kiev on the basis of "all those identified for all those identified" principle by the end of the year. The participants in the summit pledged to ensure all-round and comprehensive ceasefire till the end of 2019 and agreed to support an agreement within the framework of the Contact Group for a settlement in the east of Ukraine on three more areas of disengagement of forces in the zone of the conflict by the end of March 2020.

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