By The Daily Journalist.
Foreign ministers Sergey Lavrov; Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin; Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and France, Laurent Fabius, on Saturday gave new steps to appease eastern Ukraine with a commitment to advance the removal of weapons and mines of the separatist regions.
As Steinmeier told the media after the conclusion of the meeting at Villa Borsig, the guest residence owned by the German Foreign Ministry on the outskirts of Berlin, made progress on some points of the agreements signed in February on Minsk.
Today’s meeting, the seventh keeping ministers in the so-called “format of Normandy” was held in a different environment to the above. For the first time since both the Kiev authorities and the pro-Russian rebels had confirmed the ceasefire in the breakaway regions, one of the main commitments of Minsk violated repeatedly.
In fact, according to Steinmeier, the meeting was “the least confrontational of all other previous meetings and most the successful” although the agreements should be closed by the contact group, in which Russia, Ukraine involved the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the pro-Russian separatists.
Steinmeier hoped that the parties in conflict give the green light for the next meeting to concretean agreement for full and “soon” light weapons and tanks removed.
In his view, the agreement between Kiev and Moscow brokered by the OSCE is near attained because the positions of the parties are “not far”.
The four ministers also agreed that can start removing landmines and, in this context, Steinmeier re-emphasized the importance of OSCE observers freely accessible without restriction to the conflict zone.
As noted, there was also progress on the political process to follow Ukraine in compliance with the agreements of Minsk, including the holding of local elections, but must thorny questions must still be negotiated about the electoral process and constitutional reform. “There are proposals on the table and in our opinion are a good basis for decisions,” he said.
From the humanitarian point of view and with the arrival of winter, the ministers advocated that aid organizations have unrestricted access to the population of the separatist regions. The objective is, he said, the boost of planned reconstruction projects, with special attention to water supply.
Today’s meeting served to prepare for the 2 October summit in Paris with the leaders of the four countries: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko, the French François Hollande and Germany’s Angela Merkel.
Despite the commitments made, Steinmeier warned of the difficulty of the ongoing process and the fragility of each advance.
