The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, along with the French president, François Hollande, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced on Wednesday 19 October after a Normandy format summit in Berlin with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that a roadmap would be drawn up on application of the Minsk agreements.
Poroshenko said at a joint press conference with Hollande and Merkel that by the end of November, they would be approving a roadmap, which will be a document on implementation of all the Minsk agreements. Merkel said the roadmap would list the sequences of different steps to be taken, which were not sufficiently laid out in the Minsk process and about which there were still disagreements. She said the good news was that they had a starting point, but there are a few questions for which the chronological order is not always clear and the job now was to draw up a sequence. She added that Ukraine’s interest was security above all, although Russia’s interest is for the political process to progress at the same time. Merkel said the work on the roadmap would be done in the space of a month by foreign ministers, warning that there was still much work to be done.
At their meeting, the presidents and chancellor also discussed the ceasefire, the OECD’s mission having access to all the territory, arms withdrawal, electoral law, the future special status of regions in the east of Ukraine, and humanitarian issues such as the problem of detainees. Merkel said that progress had been limited after the Paris summit in October 2015, but there had not been any miracles at the Berlin summit either. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)