MOSCOW, June 21. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky only aggravated the problem of the disengagement of forces in Donbass when he refused to accept a corresponding provision in the document that had been agreed ahead of the Normandy Four summit in 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday after talks with OSCE Secretary General Helga Schmid.
He said that among the topics of his talks with the OSCE secretary-general was the implementation of agreements on Ukraine. "I once again drew attention to the fact that the 2019 Normandy Four summit in Paris discussed a document that had been agreed by experts and the leaders’ advisers and had been put before the leaders. The first provision of the document was about the disengagement of forces, withdrawal of heavy weapons along the entire contact line in Donbass. It was all agreed and even signed," he recalled.
However, in his words, Zelensky refused to accept this provision, which is of crucial importance for people’s security. "He said that such disengagement should be carried out only in three localities," Lavrov noted. "Efforts to agree these localities continue until now. In other words, instead of settling this problem once and for all and make people safe on both sides of the contact line, Zelensky has preserved this problem and aggravated it."