KIEV, September 3 (RIA Novosti) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Wednesday he expected a substantive dialogue on Ukrainian reconciliation to begin at the three-party Contact Group meeting in Minsk scheduled for Friday.
“I pin my great hopes on the Minsk meeting Friday and expect that the peace process will eventually begin,” he said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Poroshenko discussed the first steps to bringing an end to the bloodshed in eastern Ukraine over the telephone and that the presidents’ views to exiting the crisis were extremely similar.
Later in the day, Putin outlined a seven-point plan for the settlement of the crisis in Ukraine, calling on Kiev to withdraw troops from southeastern regions of the country and militia to cease military advances. The plan also includes, among other proposals, the creation of an international monitoring force and the establishment of a humanitarian corridor.
On September 1, the Contact Group on Ukrainian reconciliation, comprising Russia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Ukrainian government and eastern Ukraine’s independence supporters met in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
Representatives from the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics said during the meeting that if the self-proclaimed republics received certain legislative guarantees of their special status, they would make every effort to “save the single economic, cultural and political space of Ukraine and the whole space of the Russian-Ukrainian civilization."
The next Contact Group meeting is scheduled for September 5.
