BERLIN (Sputnik) – The foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine (the Normandy Four) have finished a fresh round of talks on ways to resolve the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.
The agenda of the consultations between Sergei Lavrov, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Laurent Fabius, and Pavlo Klimkin focused on the implementation of the Minsk peace accords, including setting up working sub-groups within the so-called Contact Group on Ukraine.
The results of the talks are expected to become a key issue of discussion during a G7 summit, which starts in Germany on Tuesday.
Prior to the talks, Steinmeier said that it was "too early to celebrate victory in Ukrainian crisis settlement despite notable progress," as infrequent violations of the ceasefire regime persist in some contested areas of southeastern Ukraine.
The truce included a set of measures to stop military confrontation in Ukraine's southeast, particularly a ceasefire that came into force on February 15 and has been generally holding.
This was the second ceasefire enforced in southeastern Ukraine. The first one was agreed upon in September, 2014, during a meeting of the trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, which comprises representatives from Kiev, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics (DPR and LPR), Moscow and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has been monitoring the situation in Ukraine.
The September truce failed to hold and there was an upsurge in violence in Ukraine's southeastern regions in January, following which the February Normandy talks were organized.
