DUSHANBE. July 30 (Interfax) - At the upcoming meeting in Minsk the contact group on Ukraine should seek to implement the April 17 Geneva agreement on crisis resolution in this country, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"It is necessary to return to the solid basis of the consensus that was reached among Russia, the United States, Ukraine and the European Union on April 17 and start this work at last. We agreed (during a telephone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry) that the meeting that is now being planned in Minsk should focus precisely on working out agreements to implement the Geneva statement, and, probably, the roadmap the OSCE - the Swiss president - has proposed in a follow-up of the Geneva document," he told a press conference in Dushanbe on Wednesday.
Lavrov also said he spoke to U.S. State Secretary Kerry a day earlier.
"We always talk fairly constructively and tell the truth to one another," Lavrov said.
During the conversation Lavrov pointed, in particular, "to the need for the Ukrainian army to stop its operations immediately in the crash site in breach of the UN SC resolution," he said
"Kerry promised that he will signal (to the Ukrainians). We'll see how receptive Kyiv will be to this signal," Lavrov said.
"We paid particular attention to the April 17 Geneva agreement that he and I and Catherine Ashton (the head of the EU diplomacy) and the then Ukrainian foreign minister had been working on for eight hours and which our western partners later refused to support in the UN SC," the Russian minister added.
"He agreed with me that the statement is the best basis for further work," Lavrov said.
"But the question of the negotiating ability arises again because literally an hour after our conversation with John Kerry he told a press conference in the U.S., held jointly with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, that Ukraine is finally ready for a ceasefire and he said that Ukraine is ready for a dialogue and that components for dialogue with rebels are contained in Poroshenko's peace plan. Not in the Geneva Statement: John Kerry did not mention the Geneva Statement - which he agreed to bring up in the conversation with me - but he cited Poroshenko's peace plan under which militias must surrender weapons and hope for amnesty, otherwise they will be destroyed. You will probably understand the difference between this postulate and the call for an immediate equal dialogue that was formulated by Russia, the U.S., Ukraine and the EU in the Geneva Statement," the minister added.