Kuchma initiates urgent meeting of Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this at a press conference on Wednesday, May 20, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"To understand what Leonid Danylovych Kuchma is doing now, today, by the way, due to a statement made by [so-called 'LPR' leader Leonid] Pasichnyk, he wrote a letter with the request to convene an urgent meeting of the Minsk Contact Group. He signed this letter and addressed it to Ms. Grau," Zelensky said.

Earlier at the press conference, the president said that Kuchma remained the head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group.

Oleksiy Reznikov, the first deputy head of the Ukrainian delegation to the TCG, told Interfax-Ukraine on May 20 that Ukraine had asked the OSCE to hold an extraordinary meeting of the security group. Reznikov said that accusations against the Ukrainian Armed Forces regarding the alleged shelling of energy infrastructure facilities in non-government-controlled areas in Luhansk region were untrue, provocative and completely unjustified.

According to media reports, the leaders of "DPR" and "LPR" militants, Leonid Pasichnyk and Denys Pushylin, said that the units of the occupying forces in Donbas had been put on combat alert allegedly due to "intensified shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces."

However, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in its daily report for May 19 recorded a decrease in the number of ceasefire violations in Donetsk and Luhansk regions on May 18.

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