Steinmeier: Progress on Minsk II is urgently needed
The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said that there is still a lot of work to be done to reach a full implementation of the ceasefire agreement in the Donbas region. However, progress on it is "urgently necessary," the German Foreign Minister said during a joint press conference with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Pavel Klimkin, on Thursday, September 8, 2016 in Berlin.
"With regard to the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, we must also talk about the laws regarding special status, local elections, and amnesty. For this reason, our legal experts met many times during the summer. However, we both know that we will need to do a lot of work to eventually come to an agreement on these issues," Reuters quoted Steinmeier as saying.
With regard to the status of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, Steinmeier once again expressed his dissatisfaction with it. "We are not satisfied and cannot be satisfied with the state of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements," the AFP News Agency quoted Steinmeier as saying. The Minister added that no part of the Normandy Format resulted in "our making no headway with the implementation of the agreements."
As was previously reported, on Thursday, September 8, 2016, Pavlo Klimkin has visited Berlin to meet with German politicians in order to "deepen the Ukrainian-German dialogue and develop bilateral cooperation with the aim of carrying out structural reforms in Ukraine," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.