BERLIN (AFP) ― The foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France ended a meeting Monday without being able to set a date for a hoped-for peace summit on ending the Ukrainian conflict.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had earlier said he hoped that a leaders’ meeting of the four countries could take place Thursday in Kazakhstan with the goal of signing a peace document with Russia.
However, the four ministers were only able to affirm their “strong commitment to a swift and comprehensive peaceful solution of the current crisis, including a sustainable political process.”
“Ministers reconfirmed that the basis for conflict resolution are the Minsk agreements that have to be implemented by all sides in their entirety,” they said in a joint statement after about four hours of talks in Berlin.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel had at the weekend told Russian President Vladimir Putin and Poroshenko that a peace summit was pointless as long as a truce was not respected, and France has expressed similar reservations.
“The situation in Ukraine remains extremely tense,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said before starting the talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Ukraine’s Pavlo Klimkin and Laurent Fabius of France.
“Because there is still no permanent ceasefire, people are dying in eastern Ukraine, and the humanitarian situation ... remains very worrying,” Steinmeier said, stressing that “we still have no sustainable path out of the crisis”.
After the talks he said that the top diplomats had “a very long, very open exchange, with controversies” and that “the differences of opinion that still exist showed how difficult it is to achieve progress” toward a political solution and a summit.
koreaherald@heraldcorp.com
