Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin is confident that the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron will support the "Minsk process". "I am sure that [Macron] and his team will work very consistently and powerfully to put pressure on Russia in order to do what it has to do," Klimkin said in a VOA interview in Washington on 10 May.
He said Russia is consciously changing tactics in an effort to drive the resolution of the conflict in Donbas into a dead end.
"[The Kremlin] is trying to somehow forge an entirely different logic, speaking of some mystical "people of Donbas." That is, this logic is deliberately aimed at to raise the stakes and legalize the Russian protectorate, which they in fact have created in Donbas, but everyone understands perfectly well that this is a road to nowhere," Klimkin said.
Ukrainian minister added that one of the first official visits of Makron will be to Germany including to discuss both bilateral coordination and coordination between Ukraine, Germany and France.
Earlier, the representative of Ukraine in the humanitarian subgroup of the Tripartite Contact Group, Iryna Herashchenko, said that the negotiations in the "Normandy" and Minsk formats were put on hold ahead of the elections in Germany and France.
The centrist Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential race with 66.06% of the vote, garnering the support of 20.7mn voters. His rival, extreme right Marin Le Pen scored only 33.94%, or 10.6mn votes.