Ukraine is continuing to display ambiguity about its stance on agreements negotiated by the Normandy group and approved by the UN Security Council in a special resolution pertaining to the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th July, 2020) Ukraine is continuing to display ambiguity about its stance on agreements negotiated by the Normandy group and approved by the UN Security Council in a special resolution pertaining to the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
The Normandy group, comprised of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, has negotiated a landmark agreement on peace process in eastern Ukraine in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, hence the name, which was then enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 2202. Kiev has repeatedly stressed at various political levels, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that it considered the Minsk agreements non-binding.
"We continue the Normandy format contacts. A meeting took place recently among the advisers and political assistants of Normandy leaders. It offered yet another attestation that Ukraine categorically refuses to confirm the Minsk agreements, approved by the UN Security Council," Lavrov said at a press conference following talks with his counterparts from the African Union troika, which comprises Egypt, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
According to the Russian foreign minister, Moscow has inquired, but never got a direct reply from Kiev about its stance on commitment to the Minsk agreements.
The minister also conveyed Russia's expectation that Germany and France, as co-founders of the Normandy format, would "bear their share of responsibility" for the position that Kiev takes on the Minsk agreements.
�The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014, when the army launched an offensive against the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, referred to together as Donbas, after they proclaimed independence from Kiev. Their decision came in response to what they consider to have been a coup in Kiev that toppled the old government in February of that year.
