Consultative Council in Donbas not discussed at Normandy format ministerial meeting

"My Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, raised this issue [the creation of the so-called Consultative Council] and expressed Russia’s position on this matter in detail, but we did not discuss it. We listened to the position of our Russian counterpart on the Consultative Council,” Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba said at an online briefing on Thursday, April 30, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

As a reminder, at the meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group on the peaceful settlement of the situation in Donbas on March 11, attended by Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak and Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation Dmitry Kozak, an agreement was reached on the establishment of the Consultative Council within the TCG political subgroup after the consultations with the representatives of the OSCE, France, and Germany on the implementation of the agreements reached during the Normandy format summit.

According to Yermak, no steps were taken at the TCG meeting to create a legal framework for recognizing representatives of the occupied Donbas.

On March 13, representatives of the Servant of the People Party declared the inadmissibility of participation of representatives of the occupied Donbas in Ukraine-Russia talks within the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group.

Later, Yermak assured that the format of the TCG negotiations in Minsk between the representatives of Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the OSCE remained unchanged.

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