The next meeting of the Minsk Working Group on humanitarian issues, scheduled for today, was disrupted due to the fault of the representative of Kiev.
People’s Deputy Galina Tretyakova, participating in the negotiations from Ukraine, once again demonstrated absolutely incorrect and undiplomatic behaviour. For no objective reason, she disconnected from the conference literally immediately after the start of the dialogue. Later, for an hour, all the participants, including the coordinator of the working group Ms. Relander, waited for the representative of Ukraine to return to the negotiating table. But that did not happen.
As a result, the discussion of the most important topics of the humanitarian block did not take place. Galina Tretyakova’s reluctance to get down to work led to the fact that the issues of exchange of prisoners and procedural “cleansing” were not considered again.
There is no progress in the search for missing persons, which is unacceptable, taking into account the number of appeals we receive from relatives of missing citizens on both sides of the contact line. Not only is Ukraine, despite the strong recommendations of international organizations, not working in this direction within its own country, but its representatives are also blocking the consideration of the issue at the Minsk platform.
It should be emphasized that for more than a year and a half the work of the humanitarian group has, in fact, been blocked. After Ukraine once again changed its negotiators, we cannot make progress on any of the issues on the agenda.
This is unacceptable in view of the specifics of the work of the subgroup. The fate of people directly depends on our decisions. Therefore, all participants should make every effort to break the negotiation deadlock, and not engage in provocations.
