MOSCOW, September 10. /TASS/. The US and the EU are playing a dangerous game when saying that the Minsk peace deal will be disrupted if local elections are held in Donbas, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said after talks with his Sudan and South Sudanese counterparts in Moscow.
"We have noticed that our Western partners - European partners and the US - start playing a dangerous game when saying that if local elections are held in Donbas in line with the decisions that Donetsk and Luhansk were forced to accept amid the lack of dialogue with Kiev, then in this case this will mean a disruption of the Minsk agreements implementation," Lavrov said.
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Moscow has stated many times that Kiev's authorities have been consistently acting in complete contradiction to the Minsk agreements since they came into force, Lavrov reminded.
Lavrov said there has been no direct dialogue on the constitutional reform between Kiev and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and also noted the ambiguity of the constitutional provision concerning the particularities of self-government in Donbas.
"This also concerns the law on amnesty as without it is difficult to expect that the elections will be fair and just," he stressed.
Local elections in Donbas are envisaged by the Minsk accords signed in Belarus on February 12. The peace deal also implies ceasefire, weaponry withdrawal, prisoner exchange and constitutional reform.The Ukrainian forces and militias of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly accused each other of violating ceasefire and other points of the Minsk agreements.