The Trilateral Contact Group for Ukraine will meet next time in Minsk on January 13, 2016, former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's representative in the group, told journalists in Kyiv on Thursday.

"As concerns the continuation of the Trilateral Contact Group's work, it's already in our plans [to meet on] January 13, then on January 20, and February is also mapped out. We are simply going ahead of events just in case, because we perfectly understand that there is no other option except continuing the negotiations," he said.

Kuchma assumed that the crisis settlement process will be quite long, as a lot of issues have still not been resolved.

"To my great regret, I don't have optimism on this matter. But no other formats exist today so far," he said.

A large amount of political, social, and humanitarian issues have been discussed in the course of the Minsk talks, he said.

"We understand well that 90% there depends on Russia. True, there is a lot of Makhnovism (anarchy) there, but it's Russia that is governing the process, let's be sincere," he said.

The Trilateral Contact Group will not meet again before the end of the year, he said.

"We have somewhat reformatted the entire Contact Group's work now. First working subgroups are supposed to meet, and then the Contact Group meets next day or two days later," he said.