Normandy Four leaders to visit Kyiv next week, says Ukraine Presidential Chief-of-Staff Yermak
Political advisors to the German and French leaders are to visit Kyiv next week, the chief-of-staff for the Ukrainian president, Andriy Yermak, wrote in a post on Facebook on Jan. 8.
Yermak said he had held phone calls over the previous two days with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's foreign policy adviser and French President Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic adviser to confirm the meeting’s agenda and schedule.
According to Yermak, the diplomats had agreed to “continue to coordinate activity in the current context.”
These meetings, referred to as being in the Normandy format, typically involve high-level discussions between Ukraine, Germany, France, and Russia.
Yermak stated that he had also had a phone call with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried, during which they discussed the current situation on Ukraine’s eastern border, where a Russian troop build-up has sparked fears of a further Russian invasion into Ukraine.
Earlier, on Jan. 6, Russia’s chief Ukraine negotiator Dmitriy Kozak said he believed it “would be harmful to create” another negotiation framework in parallel to the Normandy Format.
Before that, in late December, Yermak had said he was planning to hold talks with Kozak to discuss the state of affairs in the Trilateral Contact Group, a group of representatives from Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which was created in 2014 to facilitate a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Dec. 15 said Ukraine was ready to make use of any format to negotiate with Russia.
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