Diplomats from Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia will meet in Berlin on June 11 as they seek to revive a stalled peace process in eastern Ukraine, the German foreign minister said on Friday. "Over the past weeks, in discussions with the foreign ministers of Ukraine, France and Russia, we've been aiming to organise a new meeting," German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on a visit to the government-held port city of Mariupol in the war-torn east of the country. Maas, who was accompanied by his Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin, said he was pleased that the foreign ministers of the four countries would get together "to discuss the future development of Ukraine and the Minsk process" in comments released by his government. Efforts to put an end to a four-year conflict between Ukranian government troops and pro-Russian rebels that has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 2014 have come to a halt.
Representatives of the four 'Normandy format' countries have held several sessions but their meetings have become increasingly rare.
On Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said France's Emmanuel Macron and Russia's Vladimir Putin agreed during their Saint Petersburg summit last week on the need to restart the Ukrainian peace process this month.
At a summit in Minsk in February 2015, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany negotiated a package of measures to end the war but since then Kiev and Moscow-backed rebels have repeatedly accused each other of violating a number of truces.
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