MOSCOW, October 2. /TASS/. The timeframe for the next summit of the Normandy Four group (Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine) will be set by the leaders, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a televised interview with Channel One, which was published by the Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday.
"The presidents will decide on that," he said answering a question.
Earlier, Russian Presidential Aide Vladislav Surkov told TASS that the date of holding the Normandy Four summit may be set only after the forces are withdrawn from two earlier agreed sites on the Donbass contact line. Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that a date for the next Normandy Four summit might be determined in the near future.
At the meeting in Minsk on Tuesday, the Contact Group’s members agreed on the Steinmeier formula on granting a special status to Donbass and on withdrawing troops from two areas on the contact line, namely in Petrovskoye and Zolotoye. Russia insisted that this was the necessary condition for discussing the preparations for a new Normandy Four summit.
In 2015, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the then German foreign minister, suggested a special procedure to enforce special status to Donbass. Thus, special status should be granted to that region of Ukraine first on a temporary basis on the day of local elections there. Special status will be granted permanently after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) publishes a report confirming the legitimacy of election results.