Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and his French counterpart, Jean-Yves Le Drian, have discussed the conflict in Ukraine's breakaway east at a meeting on Tuesday and agreed that member states of the Normandy group should strive for more efficiency in their mediation efforts
KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th August, 2021) Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and his French counterpart, Jean-Yves Le Drian, have discussed the conflict in Ukraine's breakaway east at a meeting on Tuesday and agreed that member states of the Normandy group should strive for more efficiency in their mediation efforts.
Le Drian arrived in Kiev on Tuesday on the occasion of Ukraine's 30th anniversary of independence. The focus of his meeting with Kuleba was announced to be Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic aspirations and political dialogue with France.
"The second topic that we discussed was, of course, the Normandy format and the situation in the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Kuleba said at a press conference after the meeting.
Ukraine and France believe that the Normandy format should continue to work and be more dynamic, the Ukrainian minister said.
"We are ready to convene Normandy foreign ministers, and we hope that our Russian colleague, Minister [Sergey] Lavrov, will also take a constructive and conscientious approach to this meeting," Kuleba said.
The Normandy format includes France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. It was established in 2014 to broker peace between Ukraine and its Donetsk and Luhansk regions, known together as Donbas. They unilaterally proclaimed independence following what they considered a coup in Kiev that winter, to which the Ukrainian government responded by launching an offensive.
