Ukrainian president says Kiev has nothing to negotiate in Berlin

DAVOS, January 21. /TASS/. Kiev does not have anything to negotiate at the talks in Berlin, as everything was coordinated and signed last September in Minsk, President Petro Poroshenko said on Wednesday ahead of the forthcoming ‘Normandy Quartet’ meeting on Ukrainian conflict settlement.

Along with it, he said there can be no military solution to the conflict in Ukraine.

“I’m a president of peace because there is no military solution to this problem,” Poroshenko said.

He outlined Kiev’s position, saying the Ukrainian government insisted on a pullback of heavy armaments from the line of disengagements in eastern Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier in the day Russia has secured consent from eastern Ukrane self-defence forces to pulling heavy armaments away from the line suggested by Kiev.

“The shelling of cities in eastern Ukraine continues and people are dying,” he said. “The main thing now is to disengage the heavy armaments in compliance with the Minsk accords.”

“We’ve already secured an agreement with the self-defence forces on pulling the weapons away from the line Kiev insists on rather than from the actual line of contact,” Lavrov said. “Now it’s the turn of the Ukrainian authorities to act.”

In the meantime, a meeting of political directors of the Normandy format countries - Russia, Germany, Ukraine, and France - on how to settle the aggravating situation in eastern Ukraine was underway in Berlin.

The Russian delegation to the conference was chaired by Viktor Sorokin, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s 2nd Department for the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Journalists weren't admitted to the session, which was held behind closed doors.

German officials described it as a purely preparatory round of consultations before a ministerial session and said no decisions or statements would be made on Wednesday.