MOSCOW, April 20./TASS/. Three-hour-long talks on Monday, involving the political advisors to the leaders of Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France and representatives from the foreign ministries of the Normandy Four countries, ended without result, a source close to the negotiations told TASS.
"The videoconference was devoted to discussion of the clusters for the implementation of the Minsk agreements. At the initiative of the Russian side, the section of the clusters on the observance of the ceasefire was discussed in the first place," the source said, adding that the talks had not even got down to the other settlement issues in the clusters.
According to the source, Russia’s concrete proposals concerning the mechanism to prevent escalation in shelling, as well as the ways to hold accountable the guilty parties "were obstructed by Ukraine". "Instead of concrete decisions, representatives of Germany and France proposed an unaddressed declarative political statement on commitment to the ceasefire," he said. This was done in the manner that Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Dmitry Kozak described at the talks ‘we are in favor of everything that is good and against everything that is bad,’ the source added.
According to him, "the positions of France, Germany and Ukraine testify to an obvious desire to imitate and stall further the process of negotiations even at the cost of casualties and destruction in Donbass on both sides of the contact line".
"An emergency meeting of the working subgroup for security issues will be held on Tuesday at the initiative of Donetsk [in connection with the death of a civilian on April 14, 2021]," the source said. "Given the Ukrainian stance during today’s session, any progress whatsoever can hardly be expected at tomorrow’s session," the source summed up.