Donetsk, Feb 9 - DAN. Ukraine has earned the status of inept partner over seven years of Minsk talks, unable to keep its promises even after making written commitments, Donetsk People’s Republic representative at the Minsk talks, DPR Foreign Minister Natalia Nikonorova said.

At the Wednesday video conference, DPR and LPR representatives asked their Kiev counterparts at least ten times if they would present a written response to the Road Map project, as promised by Andrey Yermak, the political advisor to the Ukrainian president in the Normandy Four format, Nikonorova said.

“Instead of giving clear answers to our simple questions, Mr Kostin (Andrey Kostin, acting first deputy head of the Ukrainian delegation - eds Donetsk News Agency) started musing over the topic of each negotiator’s presumed right to independently choose the format of their response. As we understood, Kiev prefers the verbal, nor written format. The ineptitude and insufficiency of exclusively verbal interaction between the negotiating parties is proven at least by the fact that over seven years of the Minsk process which mostly ran in the form of verbal interaction, this format has yielded no effective results,” she said.

Over this time, Kiev has repeatedly replaced its negotiators, and a dramatic change in the verbal positions of the same negotiator and even their refusal to fulfil written accords has been observed. “Of course, there is no confidence in Ukrainian delegates and their unsubstantiated promises,” the DPR representative said.

The DPR Foreign Ministry reported that Kiev at the Wednesday video conference refused to discuss real practical moves or make decisions on all negotiating tracks on a peaceful settlement of the situation in Donbass. In particular, it ignored the Republics’ proposal to work out uniform rules for crossing the checkpoints on the contact line. *jk