Updated 4:04 p.m. Moscow Time
MILAN, October 17 (RIA Novosti) - No political solution has been found so far for the Ukrainian crisis that has seriously threatened stability and security in Europe, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy said Friday.
"The European security environment has undergone profound changes. The conflict in Ukraine has not yet found a political solution," Rompuy said following a breakfast meeting of Russian, Ukrainian and EU leaders in Milan.
Earlier in the day, the Russian president’s spokesman said that the breakfast meeting was constructive, although some of its participants were reluctant to learn about the real state of affairs in eastern Ukraine.
The 1.5-hour breakfast meeting on the margins of the ASEM summit in northern Italy brought together Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko, as well as British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.
On September 5, the trilateral Contact Group in Minsk reached a series of agreements between the Ukrainian government and the self-proclaimed people's republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Among the provisions of the deal are an "all-for-all" prisoner exchange, withdrawal of heavy weaponry, additional humanitarian convoys from Russia to eastern Ukraine, and a ceasefire which came into force on the same day.
The memorandum that specifies the steps for the ceasefire implementation was adopted on September 19. It entailed the establishment of a 30 kilometer (approximately 19 miles) buffer zone on the current line of contact to be monitored by the OSCE.
Numerous violations have been reported in the regions since the ceasefire was established.
At least 331 deaths have been reported in eastern Ukraine since the ceasefire deal on September 5, bringing the overall death toll in the six-month-old conflict to more than 3,600, the UN said last week.
