MOSCOW, May 27./TASS/. Russia expects that Ukraine will not use the situation with the emergency landing of a Ryanair flight in Belarus to dodge the implementation of the Minsk agreements, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference on Thursday.
He cautioned against conflating the two things, "if, of course, the Ukrainian side is not seeking a pretext to dodge its commitments". "I hope that France and Germany, as co-authors of the Minsk agreements, won’t let this happen," Lavrov said.
"Ukrainian envoy to the Contact Group on settling the situation in Eastern Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk cannot make decisions on changes in the format of the negotiations mechanism", Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated at a press conference on Thursday. The remark was in response to a request by TASS to comment on Kravchuk’s statement on the impossibility of continuing the negotiations on Donbass in Minsk.
"As for the statement by Mr. Kravchuk, technically, he is, of course, the head of the delegation, but it’s not up to him to decide how the Contact Group continues to operate. The Contact Group was created in the context of the package of documents which was upheld at the February 2015 summit in Minsk and then approved by a UN Security Council resolution," the top diplomat said.
He also reminded the journalists about the forced landing of a Belarusian Belavia flight in Kiev in 2016, when journalist and anti-Maidan activist Armen Martirosyan was taken off the plane "for no reason at all, without any explanations". Neither Kravchuk nor Western countries showed "the same emotions" in that incident.
Earlier, Kravchuk said that Ukraine would ask all parties to the Contact Group talks, first of all, the OSCE, to find a new venue for the talks.