“The Belarusian Foreign Ministry has made all the preliminary preparations for the event, everything else depends on the participants’ decision,” Mironchik said in response to a question of when the next possible date could be to continue talks on the Ukraine crisis.
On Sunday, Kiev announced that the next meeting of the so-called Contact Group on Ukraine, comprising representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), was to take place on Tuesday, December 9.
A ceasefire in Ukraine was agreed to at a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine held in Minsk on September 5. A following meeting on September 19 resulted in a memorandum specifying its rules and implementation. Currently both sides have accused each other of numerous violations of the ceasefire.
Following a February coup in Kiev, residents of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine established people's republics that later declared independence. In mid-April Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in those regions, which has led to an acute humanitarian situation.
