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Kremlin says work on Normandy Four summit talks is underway

"We have a clear-cut agenda [for the Normandy Four], it had been confirmed by a set of decisions on behalf of the Minsk Agreements and we continue working on it," Dmitry Peskov noted
Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov Sergei Bobylev/TASS
Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov
© Sergei Bobylev/TASS

MOSCOW, October 12. /TASS/. A work within the Normandy Four negotiations format is still underway, including preparations for the summit talks, although there is no progress regarding steps to implement the Minsk Agreements and decisions made at the Paris summit, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.

"The work is underway," Peskov told journalists. "We have nothing to boast about either in terms of the Minsk Agreements’ implementation or in terms of the Paris agreements’ implementation."

"However, we continue with this work and received a confirmation yesterday to carry on with it," he added.

The Russian presidential spokesman also noted that the agenda of a possible summit meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky may differ from the agenda of the Normandy Four.

"We have a clear-cut agenda [for the Normandy Four], it had been confirmed by a set of decisions on behalf of the Minsk Agreements and we continue working on it," Peskov said.

President Putin held a telephone conversation on October 11 with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The Kremlin press service stated following the talks that Putin, Merkel and Macron "discussed in detail the disturbing situation around the stalling of the process of the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict" and stressed the importance of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements as the basis for the conflict settlement in Donbass.

The Normandy Four group was established on June 6, 2014, when the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine for the first time, discussed ways to resolve the Donbass conflict during the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day allied landings in the French region of Normandy.

Five summits have been held since then, with the last one taking place in Paris on December 9, 2019. Over the past months, negotiations have mostly involved political advisors and the foreign ministers of the group’s member states.