Where the trilateral contact group on a Donbas settlement meets is of no importance to its actual results, the Novoye Vremya news website has quoted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin as saying.
"The venue of the format is of no particular significance… What is important, unfortunately, is that we have not been heading forward because Russia fundamentally refuses to honour any of its commitments and the reason is very simple – it wants to retains things in occupied Donbas as they are, which is a Russian colony," Klimkin said.
Minsk was selected as the venue for trilateral contact group meetings because of "Belarus's relative neutrality" and good logistics.
On 19 January, US President Donald Trump suggested that the Donbas talks could be moved from Minsk elsewhere.