MOSCOW.Oct 9 (Interfax) - The leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) are not expecting the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine to hold another meeting in Minsk for at least a month, DPR premier Alexander Zakharchenko told Interfax.
"There is no clarity over a Contact Group meeting, but we are not going there for at least one month," he said.
Commenting on the situation around prisoner exchanges, Zakharchenko said that these will resume once Ukraine has accepted the militia's requirements regarding the identification papers on persons being swapped.
"We have set a number of demands for the Ukrainian side. In particular, it must provide their documents and identification papers because people are often released to us without papers, whereas their identification cards and passports are retained by the Ukrainian side," he said.
On September 5, members of the Ukraine-Russia-European Union Contact Group held talks with representatives from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and signed a protocol whose central point was an agreement on immediate ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. The immediate ceasefire took effect on the same day from 6 p.m. Kyiv time.
The document is aimed at implementing the peace plan proposed by Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko and the initiatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Under the protocol, the parties agreed, in particular, to ensure the immediate bilateral ceasefire and monitoring of the ceasefire by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), to urgently release all captives and announce an amnesty for combatants in eastern Ukraine, take steps to improve the humanitarian situation and pass a law granting a special status for certain districts of the Donbas region.
The talks involved the OSCE's representative Heidi Tagliavini, Ukraine's second president Leonid Kuchma, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov, and representatives from the self-proclaimed republics: DPR premier Zakharchenko, his deputy Andrei Purgin, and LPR premier Igor Plotnitsky.