ST. PETERSBURG, September 6. /TASS/. Russia is not interested in another Normandy Quartet meeting just for "meeting's sake," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday. Such a contact will be necessary if it will a least reaffirm the need for compliance with the resolutions of the quartet's December 2019 summit, he stressed.
"We do not need a meeting for meeting's sake. We need a meeting that will at least confirm compliance with the decisions of the latest Normandy Quartet summit, which took place in Paris nearly two years ago, in December 2019. Ukraine still refuses to implement everything that was written down there," he said.
Lavrov said that both Berlin and Paris "avoid eye contact and keep silent, because they have nothing to say in reply," when officials on the Ukrainian side say that the Minsk agreements are dead.
"When Ukraine, as represented by its leaders and government members, claims that the United States, Britain and Poland should be invited as go-betweens, in fact they directly insult Berlin and Paris. Yet they keep persuading us: let us have a meeting," Lavrov said.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky following talks with his US counterpart Joe Biden in Washington on September 1 said that he addressed Biden with several proposals for US participation in settling the conflict in Donbass. At the same time, Zelensky avoided a direct answer if his proposals implied the United States' participation in the Normandy group.
The Normandy Quartet emerged as a platform for negotiations in June 2014. At the celebrations on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the allied forces' landing in Normandy during World War II the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany for the first time discussed a settlement of the conflict in Donbass. A total of five summit level meetings have been held since. The latest one was in Paris on December 9, 2019. In recent months, Normandy quartet contacts proceeded mostly at the level of political advisers and foreign ministers.