The contact group has reached a new ceasefire agreement in eastern Ukraine – SME.sk

In December, there was an increase in ceasefire violations.

KIEV. Negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have agreed to restore a full ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. The OSCE announced this on Wednesday evening in a statement quoted by Reuters.

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These participants called The Trilateral Contact Group for the Conflict Settlement in Donbas (TKG) “expressed a strong commitment to action” aimed at strengthening the ceasefire agreement reached on 22 July 2020, said the Special Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office in Ukraine and the Mikko Kinnunen Contact Group.

In recent months, Kiev and Moscow have accused each other of violating the ceasefire they agreed on in July 2020, which last year helped significantly reduce the victims of the conflict in Donbas.

However, according to Kinnunen, the current new agreement is of “extraordinary importance” to the people living on both sides of the so-called contact line.

Kinnunen added that, according to reports from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, the security situation along the contact line was unstable in December. In December 2021, there were approximately five times more ceasefire violations than in December 2020.

The conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine has already claimed more than 14,000 lives.

Although the 2015 peace agreement, brokered by France and Germany and signed in Minsk, Belarus, helped to end large-scale fighting, frequent skirmishes persist in the region.

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