The top leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine (the “Normandy Group”) conferred by telephone on the night of May 23–24, at Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s initiative. Poroshenko sought an endorsement of Kyiv’s proposal for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to create and deploy an armed police mission in the secessionist Donetsk-Luhansk territory. The Ukrainian presidency’s long communiqué indicated that the other three leaders had assented to consider this proposal in their Normandy format. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s and French President Francois Hollande’s curt communiqués did not mention this issue; instead, they urged Ukraine to …read more
Source: The Jamestown Foundation
