NEW YORK, September 25./ ITAR-TASS/. At their meeting during the UN General Assembly session in New York, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed the necessity to implement all 12 points of the Minsk agreements on the settlement of the situation in Ukraine, a US Department of State spokesman said Wednesday.
During their 40-minute meeting, Kerry and Lavrov discussed Ukraine and implementation of the Minsk deals, the American diplomat said, adding that they also spoke about the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group in Iraq and Syria, and touched upon Iran’s nuclear program.
Some 3,500 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled Ukraine’s war-torn southeast as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev’s military operation to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Lugansk republics.
The parties to the Ukrainian conflict agreed on cessation of fire during OSCE-mediated talks on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed his plan to settle the situation in the embattled east of Ukraine.