Instead of trading mutual accusations of shelling and violation of the Minsk agreement, the parties to the Ukrainian conflict should take greater efforts to implement these agreements through negotiations, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said.

During a videoconference with reporters at the State Department on Tuesday, he said "frankly you just sort of get trapped in a rabbit's hole if you start discussing who did what when and how."

"And so we really tried to focus on how do we move from here forward. And I made it very, very clear, and he accepted the idea, that there needs to be less fighting and more negotiating, and more movement with respect to the Minsk implementation process," the state secretary said.

In his words, the recent meetings of the working groups and the trilateral contact group on Donbas settlement were a little bit more productive than meetings heretofore, and "a little bit of discipline has entered into the elections discussion with respect to the separatists."

According to him, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland will be over "visiting some folks in the region shortly – today, tomorrow, and the next days."

"We are going to continue to be putting pressure on the process of the working groups to be able to more fully implement Minsk [agreements]. And I made it as clear as I possibly can that in the absence of a reduction in the hostilities, and in the absence of further progress of the implementation, Europe and the United States are going to be united in a rollover of the current level of sanctions, certainly, and whether or not more comes depends on what happens on the ground," Kerry said.

The state secretary expressed the hope for the progress in the work of the contact group and subgroups in the political settlement of the crisis.

"So if those things happen, there's a way forward. If they don’t happen, if President Putin chooses to play a double game and continues to allow the separatists to press forward, then obviously we have a very big challenge ahead of us," Kerry said.