"At 11 a.m. [09:00 GMT] — the phone talks in Normandy format with Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel," the Elysee Palace said in a statement.
On July 21, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that the Ukrainian conflict settlement phone talks would take place on Monday, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirming the date the same day.
In early July, Peskov said that Putin, Macron and Merkel discussed during their working breakfast on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg the stalled process of the Minsk peace agreements implementation and agreed to prepare the agenda for the next phone conversation in the Normandy format.
The latest conversation between the Normandy Four leaders took place in April and focused on prisoners’ exchange, observation of the ceasefire regime and the necessity to comply with the Minsk accords.
The 'Normandy Four' format was set up in June 2014 following the beginning of military conflict in eastern Ukraine. The format comprises Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany, which combined their efforts to resolve the conflict. In 2015, the mediators managed to broker a ceasefire agreement between the conflicting sides during negotiations in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. The so-called Minsk agreements, however, have been repeatedly violated since then, with both sides accusing each other of truce breaches.
The Normandy Quartet regularly discusses the progress made on the ceasefire and other provisions of the agreements. The latest meeting at the top level within the format was held on October 19, 2016 in the German capital of Berlin.
