The foreign ministers of the Normandy Four countries (Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia) will hold a video conference on Thursday, April 30, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba has said.
“The video conference will be held this Thursday, April 30. All four ministers of foreign affairs will be present. I am grateful to all of them for agreeing to join this event. There has been a long-standing need for holding talks between the Normandy Format ministers as we can see that the decisions of the Normandy summit in Paris fail to be fulfilled and we should give an impetus to their implementation in order to open the way towards the next summit in Berlin, where we will have to reach new agreements and move towards putting an end to the war, releasing Ukrainian territories from occupation and, finally, stopping Russia’s aggression in general,” he said during an online briefing on April 28 while answering a question from Interfax-Ukraine.
The minister also said that one of the key goals of the upcoming video conference will be the assessment of what has been done since the summit in Paris until April 30.
“The Ukrainian side thinks that the only positive thing is the prisoner swaps and the release of illegally detained citizens, which have been carried out,” Kuleba said.
“The second [goal] is to try – and probably this will be the most difficult part of the talks – to determine the reasons why we are seeing stagnation in other directions, in other issues,” the minister said.
The third task of the talks will be the elaboration of “at least some draft decisions for the problems we have and giving an impetus for the Trilateral Contact Group to draw up detailed decisions and their implementation directly.”
