Lavrov thanks Lukashenka

Russia welcomes the initiative of holding a meeting of a contact group on Ukraine in Minsk.

Such a statement has been made by the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov, Interfax reports.

“We are unswervingly speaking out for talks, we welcome any opportunity which opens for that, and in this respect we certainly value proposals of Belarus,” he said at a press-conference in Dushanbe.

“We shall welcome contacts, and express gratitude to our Belarusian colleagues for helping Ukrainians to sit down at the negotiating table finally,” the minister added.

Earlier the press-service of Lukashenka informed that during a phone conversation Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed him “with a request to engage the Republic of Belarus as a site for negotiations involving all the parties concerned to solve the Ukrainian crisis.”

The Ukrainian side offers two questions for discussion of the contact group: on release of all captives, who are still kept by the militants of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), and on access of international experts to the site of the Malaysian Airlines plane’s crash.

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