“Everyone expects that the Minsk meeting will allow the exchange of opinions on the extent that efforts are on in settling the political process with the goal of settling the crisis in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.
The Minsk talks will mark the first encounter between Putin and Poroshenko since early June when they had an informal conversation while attending the World War II commemoration ceremony in Normandy.
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Whether the two presidents will hold a bilateral meeting in Minsk is still unclear.
"There’s a whole range of bilateral meetings," Lavrov said Monday, adding that "exactly who will meet with whom will be announced additionally.”
Apart from the Russian and Ukrainian presidents the Minsk talks will also be attended by Catherine Ashton, the bloc's foreign policy chief, Guenther Oettinger, the European energy commissioner, and Karel De Gucht, the European trade commissioner.
Commenting on the forthcoming meeting, Ashton said last Sunday that in Minsk she would seek to convey to Ukrainian authorities the importance of good relations both with EU countries and Russia.
“You need good relations with your European neighbors; you need good relations with your Russian neighbors ... This is the message that I will take to Minsk,” Ashton said at a European political forum in the Austrian town of Alpbach.
The Minsk summit was preceded by a meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine at the Villa Borsig in Berlin on July 2. Following the two-hour negotiations Sergei Lavrov, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Laurent Fabius and Pavlo Klimkin came up with a joint declaration confirming their commitment to peace and stability in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the ministers did not ink an agreement on the de-escalation of the Ukrainian crisis.
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