French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel held a phone conversation on Tuesday night with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko, the Kremlin press service said.
"They discussed political settlement of the situation in the southeast of Ukraine. The interlocutors stressed the importance of observing the ceasefire, raising the efficiency of operations of the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission in the region, expanding its current scope of powers, and building up the Joint Control and Coordination Center," TASS cited him as saying.
At the same time, Vladimir Putin called for an immediate end to the shelling of populated localities in Donbass by Ukrainian Armed Forces. "The Russian side stressed the need for a direct dialogue between Kiev, on the one hand, and Donetsk and Lugansk, on the other, for the purpose of full-scale and all-embracing implementation of the February 12, 2015, Minsk accords," the press-service said.
Putin indicated that the package of proposals on local elections, the special status, amnesty, and decentralization had been coordinated with the leaderships of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and it would make sense for the Contact Group in charge of attaining peace settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine to scrutinize them, the Kremlin said.
The sides also had an exchange of opinion on possible steps towards resolution of acute social, economic and humanitarian problems in eastern Ukraine. In addition to it, the interlocutors took up some elements of the ongoing crisis in Syria.
