Donetsk, Sep 14 - DAN. Ukrainian representatives at the Minsk talks avoided the discussion of the road map to break the deadlock on the political track, while the OSCE representative supported the Kiev-proposed topics, Donetsk People’s Republic Deputy Foreign Minister, DPR representative in the political subgroup Natalia Mikhailova said on Tuesday.
“While fully downplaying the Contact Group’s instruction to prepare a road map on settling the conflict in our territory, Ukraine tried to impose a discussion of purely technical issues or the matters that have nothing to do with the agenda, ignoring a substantive discussion of this document,” Mikhailova said.
The purpose of the Ukrainian negotiators was to discuss a revision of the membership of the parties to the Donbass conflict. The video conference yielded no results due to this and other reasons, she said.
“For her part, the coordinator (for the OSCE Sylvie-Agnes Bermann - eds Donetsk News Agency), in violation of mediation ethics, for example, the impartiality principle, supported Ukraine and tried to convince other participants of the discussion that they needed to discuss the Kiev-proposed topics,” Mikhailova said.
In October 2020, the DPR and the LPR sent to the Contact Group a draft Road Map to implement the Minsk accords. Ukraine did not respond but a month later Kiev presented its own “plan of steps.” It turned out that 78 percent of the document was a group violation of the Package of Measures. The DPR Foreign Ministry prepared detailed comments. Earlier, the Republics repeatedly stated that the Minsk negotiations were actually blocked because Kiev had adopted a resolution on local elections whose Article 4 contradicted the Minsk Agreements.*jk