KYIV (Dispatches) - Nearly nine hours of talks between Ukraine and Russia have failed to produce a breakthrough on signing a joint document, but both sides agreed to keep talking, the chief of staff to Ukraine’s president said after the talks in Berlin.
Ukrainian and Russian officials met in the German capital for talks on ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters at a late-night briefing in Berlin, Russian envoy Dmitry Kozak said it had not been possible to “overcome” Russia and Ukraine’s different interpretations of the 2015 agreement aimed at ending fighting between pro-Russia forces and Ukrainian government troops.
The closed-door meeting saw foreign policy advisers from Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine continuing “Normandy format’’ talks, named after the 2015 agreement.
“Unfortunately, almost nine hours of negotiations ended without any visible, tangible results expressed in documents,” Kozak asserted.
His Ukrainian counterpart Andriy Yermak said the four sides “were unable to agree on any joint document” but added that they will continue the talks to break the stalemate.
“I hope that we will meet again very soon and continue these negotiations,” he said. “Everyone is determined to achieve a result.”
The longstanding conflict in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, known together as Donbas, continues to simmer notwithstanding a notional ceasefire.
Representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the two restive regions signed a 13-point agreement in February 2015 in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, which was endorsed by France and Germany.
The accord sought to end the conflict that erupted a year earlier when a wave of protests overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected government and replaced it with a Western-leaning administration.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier in on Thursday accused Ukraine of trying to rewrite the agreement and cherry-pick the elements most advantageous to it.
Yermak, however, said Ukraine was committed to the accord.
“The Ukrainian side is set on constructive dialogue. Everyone confirmed today that we have the Minsk agreements and they need to be fulfilled,” he noted.
Observers from the OSCE have recorded frequent violations of the Minsk deal by the warring sides, with Ukraine going as far as to claim that some 15,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Kiev and the Western countries accuse Moscow of having a hand in the crisis. Moscow vehemently denies the allegations.