Normandy format

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is on a visit to Germany and yesterday urged Europe to make a clearer stance on the Iranian nuclear deal, BTA reported.
    Lavrov expressed Russia's growing concern about the US's exit from nuclear arms control treaties.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his French counterpart Jean-Iv le Drian  will hold talks Tuesday to discuss the prospects for their bilateral relations and to exchange views on the situation in Syria, Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula.

The reason, according to Putin, is that the authorities in Kiev "have no desire to implement the Minsk agreements."

At one point he compared the region of Donbass with Srebrenica.

"As for the tragedy that is playing out there, one should always look at the primary source, and that was the coup (in Ukraine)," Putin said, according to Sputnik's Serbian language website.

The US President Donald Trump and the Russian President Vladimir Putin will have their first conversation over the phone on Saturday. It is going to be a relatively typical first conversation.

No breakthrough has been reached at the meeting in Minsk attended by the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia.
The countries from the Normandy Four discussed the withdrawal of armed formations from the front line in Eastern Ukraine and the exchange of prisoners of war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has cancelled his visit to France for a meeting with his French counter-part François Hollande, reported Reuters.

Earlier, the French President questioned the expediency of a meeting with Putin after Russia rejected in the Security Council of the UN the draft resolution of France and Italy for the creation of a no-fly zone over Aleppo.

The risk of open war between Russia and Ukraine is greater than it was a year ago and Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun an "information war" against Germany, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the German newspaper Bild.

Western leaders who met on the margins of last week's Group of 20 summit in Turkey agreed to extend sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine by six months until July of next year, a senior European diplomat told Reuters.

Local elections in Ukraine's Donbass region will be held in 2016 instead of this year, French President Francois Hollande has said.

The announcement has come after a "Normandy Four" summit between the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia, the website Lenta.ru reports.

During his bi-annual news conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Monday, French President Francois Hollande expressed hope that recent progress in the implementation of the ceasefire in Ukraine will result in the lifting of sanctions against Russia.