The meeting in Minsk failed - instead of Medvedchuk and Gerashchenko, experts without authority came from Ukraine
Due to the absence of a number of authorized representatives of Kyiv in Minsk, today’s meeting of the participants of the humanitarian subgroup of the Contact Group was unsuccessful.
The representative of the LPR in the subgroup, the head of the republic’s working group on the exchange of prisoners of war, Olga Kobtseva, told reporters about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“In fact, the meeting was unsuccessful. This is due, first of all, to the absence in Minsk of authorized persons from Kyiv - Viktor Medveduchka and Irina Gerashchenko. The Ukrainian side was represented only by experts, whose powers, by and large, were to listen to and transmit to their leadership the information received at the meeting,” she said.
The head of the delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Ukraine, Alan Aeschliman, without the presence of the Ukrainian side, could not say anything on the issue of reaching a compromise on the restoration of the bridge near Stanitsa Luganskaya. Elishman merely recorded what other participants said at the meeting.
“The absence of authorized representatives of Kyiv at the meeting in Minsk once again demonstrated the “desire” of the Ukrainian side for a speedy solution to the issues of exchange of detainees, restoration of the bridge near Stanitsa and a number of other pressing issues on the agenda,” Kobtseva noted.
Also, as the Belarusian Foreign Ministry previously announced, the special representative of the OSCE Chairman Martin Sajdik, who was unable to fly from Kyiv due to bad weather, did not take part in today’s meeting.