Russia is willing to continue talks with three countries about the conflict in eastern Ukraine if the Ukrainian government wants to start talks with the separatists there. The French government has announced this after a new round of the so-called Normandy talks.
The consultations that Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia held in Berlin on Thursday yielded no results. After nine hours of meetings, Russia and Ukraine announced that no agreement had been reached.
The talks got underway at the 2014 international D-Day commemoration in Normandy. A few months after a civil war broke out in eastern Ukraine, the four countries entered into talks there. In 2015, this Normandy consultative group defused the conflict with agreements concluded in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
Fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine after the 2014 ouster of elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Pro-Russian Ukrainians rioted and said they would secede from Ukraine. Russia considers the pro-Western change of power in Kyiv in 2014 as a coup d’état mainly concocted by the US. The West argues that there was a popular uprising and that Yanukovych fell as a result.
