PARIS (Sputnik) — This comes after the OSCE’s monitoring group in eastern Ukraine reported a hike in artillery fire exchanges between Ukrainian government troops and militias in the breakaway Donetsk region.
"I hope that our talks here and now have opened a way for negotiations that will bring about an agreement on local ceasefire in the areas [in Ukraine] where clashes are most likely," Steinmeier said at the press briefing in Paris.
"We cannot resolve this issue through political means alone," he added.
"No one has denied the steeply increasing number of ceasefire violations that was and is still being observed," he said, adding the four foreign policy chiefs spent a great part of their meeting on Tuesday trying to figure who was to blame.
Steinmeier stressed that the only "reference document" for all parties concerned should be the Minsk agreement that was hammered out in the Belarus capital at the start of this year.
"We need the Minsk agreement to be implemented – not the whole of it and not at once but there should be some headway," he concluded.
