To date, a number of important issues remain unresolved in the Minsk Contact Group. 

Despite loud statements by the country's political authorities about the commitment to the Minsk Agreements, Kiev continues to escalate the armed conflict in Donbass. Ukraine openly and publicly builds up the military grouping on the contact line, takes new positions in the «gray zone», approaching the militia positions. For more than half a year, Ukraine has failed to comply with the decision of the Contact Group on the separation of forces and means in three pilot, agreed areas, which does not allow the realization of the separation along the entire contact line. In particular, despite the fixation by the OSCE SMM of at least 3 seven-day periods of observance of the silence regime by the parties, Kiev has sabotaged all attempts at the separation in the Luganskaya Stanitsa area (the last one was on May 18, 2017).

Poroshenko has not signed the law on the amnesty of the parties to the conflict, as required by the Complex of Measures, since 2014, which makes it impossible to realize the exchange of detained persons on the principle of «all for all». Instead, Kiev continues to impose a tactic of dividing the detainees into categories and exchanging them by small groups, politically speculating on every exchange completed. 

Instead of implementing the paragraph 8 of the Complex of Measures to restore economic ties with Donbass, to pay pensions and social benefits, Ukraine continues to strengthen the economic blockade of Donbass. Since 2014, bans and restrictions have been imposed on the supply of energy, water resources, banking services, all state institutions have stopped working. In February 2017, a transport blockade of the railway was introduced, aimed at the complete destruction of the economy, ecological and humanitarian catastrophe in the region. Enterprises with workers' collectives were abandoned and stopped by Kiev and their oligarchs-owners.

The granting of a special status to the certain districts of the Donbass, the main issue of the settlement of the political block of the Set of Measures, has been ignored by Ukraine so far. Despite the decisions of the leaders of the «Norman Quartet» in 2015 and 2016 on the need to introduce the law on a special status under the Steinmeier formula, Ukraine, within the framework of the political working group, is ready to talk about anything but the implementation of the formula. 

We call on Ukraine to stop sabotaging the peace process and start to implement, in good faith, the Complex of Measures of the Minsk Agreements, fixed by the UN Security Council resolution in February 2015. We hope that the European guarantors of the Minsk Agreements will finally have their influence on the Ukrainian side.

According to: Новости Донецкой Республики