Ukraine wants OSCE officials to head working subgroups of Contact Group - Kuchma

Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe both believe that OSCE officials should head the Contact Group's four working subgroups to be set up to draw up roadmaps for putting the Minsk agreements into practice, the Ukrainian representative in the Contact Group said on Thursday.

"Yesterday we effectively reached an agreement on setting up the working subgroups - on security, on humanitarian, social and political problems, on all our urgent issues. Today there's only one and main point of discord: we categorically insist that those working groups should be based on the principle of the Contact Group - their heads, their coordinators should be representatives of the OSCE. But we haven't come to a final agreement, and so we've put off the matter, and the representatives of the so-called DPR and LPR are due to reply to us tomorrow," Leonid Kuchma told reporters.

Kuchma, who is a former Ukrainian president, was referring to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.

At a meeting in Belgrade on Tuesday, the foreign ministers of the so-called OSCE troika - Ivica Dacic of Serbia, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany and Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland - went through various aspects of the Ukraine issue, including the working subgroups plan.

The three ministers made nominations to the groups and put forward candidates for group coordinators, proposing the head of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission on Ukraine, Ertugrul Apakan, as coordinators of the security subgroup, Ambassador Pierre Morel as chief of the political subgroup, Thomas Mirow as head of the economic subgroup, and Heidi Tagliavini as head of the humanitarian subgroup.