VIENNA, October 28. /TASS/. Holding more Normandy Quartet meetings on a settlement in the east of Ukraine will make sense only if and when the previous instructions issued by the leaders of the quartet's participants have been acted on. In the meantime, the Ukrainian military continues to provoke violence along the engagement line, Russia's permanent representative to the OSCE, Alexander Lukashevich said at a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna on Thursday.

The Russian envoy said the state of affairs regarding the Normandy format, which performs supervisory functions in relation to the activities of the Contact Group leave much to be desired. For instance, none of the instructions issued by the Quartet's leaders and stated in the jointly agreed results of the December 9, 2019 summit have been implemented to this day. Instead of taking action on them Kiev keeps talking about its wish to hold another meeting of the Quartet at any level.

"Let me stress - further meetings will make sense only when it will be possible to state that the previous instructions by the Normandy Quartet have been translated into life. One of these was a call for the prompt de-escalation of tensions on the engagement line, in combination with the enforcement of all measures necessary to maintain the ceasefire," Lukashevich said.

He recalled that such measures, agreed by Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk in the Contact Group on July 22, 2020, brought about a temporary easing of tensions, but the current realities are evidence their effect is gone.

"During the past few weeks we saw a tactic of intentional provocations of violence by the Ukrainian military along the engagement line in Donbass," Lukashevich stressed.