Kiev: Ukraine and Russia will engage in peace talks on June 11 in Berlin with Germany and France serving as mediators, as was announced on Friday during a visit of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to eastern Ukraine.
The peace talks are intended to be conducted among the foreign ministers of those four countries.
Maas was visiting Ukraine’s eastern conflict region with his Ukrainian counterpart, Pavlo Klimkin, as a possible United Nations mission is being considered to restore peace.
“We will not leave you alone when it comes to resolving the conflict here in the east,” Maas emphasised during his visit.
Maas was due to travel to the front line in the conflict between Ukrainian military forces and pro-Russian rebels that has lasted for four years with no end in sight.
Maas and Klimkin were expected to view the front line from the village of Shyrokyne, abandoned by its 1,400 inhabitants during clashes in 2014-16 and now controlled by Ukrainian forces.
Maas told reporters the previous day after arriving in Kiev for talks with Klimkin that he hoped to negotiate a date for the start of peace talks by early July.
Maas said he would like to organize talks in the so-called Normandy format — including Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France — aimed at implementing a peace accord agreed in the Belarusian capital, Minsk,before the German parliament’s summer break, which begins July 6.
“I think this is an opportunity to revive... the stalled Minsk process,” Maas said, adding that the talks would also include a debate about whether to send a UN-backed peacekeeping mission to Ukraine.
The last time the foreign ministers from the four countries met on the Ukrainian conflict was in February 2017.
The German foreign minister’s call for a revival of the peace talks comes as observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) warned that violence was on the rise in the conflict zone.
In May, the OSCE registered more than 27,000 violations of a nominal ceasefire between the two sides compared to 18,000 in April. — dpa
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