LUGANSK, July 20. /TASS/. Kiev’s negotiators in the humanitarian subgroup of the Contact Group on the settlement in Donbass are dodging substantive discussion of the agenda and thus hampering any progress, Maria Kovshar, a spokesperson for the delegation of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) to the Minsk talks, said on Tuesday after the subgroup’s meeting.
"During the meeting, Ukraine was trying to evade substantive discussion of the agenda and instead indulged in rhetoric about the parties to the talks, the subgroup’s mandate and itsown liabilities that are clearly committed to paper in the Minsk agreements and do not require any interpretations," she said in a press statement posted on the LPR delegations’ Telegram channel.
So, no progress was reached on either of the items of the agenda due to such conduct of the Ukrainian delegation, she noted, adding that any attempts to reach progress on the issue of prisoner exchange have been failing because the Ukrainian side keeps on ignoring its commitments concerning procedural clearance of the persons released during the swaps. "Instead of actual work, Ukraine is only telling stories about problems in this process and its "heroic" efforts. But no result is seen and, hence, no progress concerning further exchanges is possible," Kovshar emphasized.
Moreover, the problem of the opening of two more checkpoints on the contact line near the settlements of Schastye and Zolotoye has not been resolved either. The Ukrainian side refuses to give full-fledged indefinite security guarantees, setting a time limit from 08:00 a.m. to 04:00 p.m., "which means that the Ukrainian army is going to shell the checkpoints’ infrastructure at all other times," she said, adding that the Ukrainian side also dodged direct dialogue with the Donbass republics on a mechanism of the search for the missing.
Subgroups on economic and security matters will also meet on Tuesday, ahead of the Contact Group’s online meeting on July 21.