© AFP/DPA/Michael KappelerGerman Justice Minister Heiko Maas
He also urged Moscow to play a constructive role in reviving peace efforts for Ukraine, which has been fighting Kremlin-backed separatists for more than five years at a cost of more than 13,000 lives.
Mass said in Berlin, regarding a cease-fire that hasn't fully taken hold:
"We have hope for the light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to issues of cease-fire, disengagement of forces, and implementation of the Minsk agreements. Now all sides need to demonstrate readiness for dialogue and action, or people will continue to die in this conflict."To resolve the issue, "we need direct and open dialogue," Maas said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier this month urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to help halt the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Insisting that peace can be returned to Ukraine only by way of diplomacy, Zelenskiy has also called for a new round of talks within the Normandy Format that includes Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France. The last Normandy meeting took place in Berlin on October 19, 2016.
When French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Putin at his summer retreat in France on August 19, he said, "We want...a new summit in the Normandy Format in the coming weeks...in close cooperation with President Zelenskiy and [German] Chancellor [Angela] Merkel."
The Russian president voiced support for the Normandy Format, though no date for further talks was set, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on August 20.
Lavrov and Maas spoke about Ukraine as recently as last month at the Petersburg Dialogue, a two-day bilateral civil society forum that was held in the German town of Konigswinter, near Bonn, Deutsche Welle reported.
Maas and Lavrov are also expected to discuss the Syrian civil war where Russian is involved militarily, developments in the Persian Gulf, and the future of arms control, TASS news agency reported.
Therein lies the rub!-- and since the Minsk was first initiated, Ukraine already another victim of the NWO US neocons (polite reference)-- how could the leaders of Europe not see these cretins were the stirrers of this rotten stew, as they are all over the world, cooking up stench in order for it to foment and boil over-- the perfect recipe for breeding global hatred. Nuland and McCain and their cookies on the Maidan, the horrors, the Odessa Massacre and the bloody inhuman war on the ethnic Russian Ukrainians of the Donbass which followed virtually overnight and continues to this day! My God!-- No wonder Crimea grabbed the bull by the horns and returned to Russia!-- for the same would have been its lot! No, for certain Russia was the saviour here, not the bloodthirsty greed crazed villains of the West!-- Look at Ukraine today! Look at Libya -- Look at Iraq -- All broken countries, courtesy of the Zionist USA-- same monster global bankster gangsters behind it all that dumped communism on Russia in 1917!
How could European leaders have been so blindsided, been such lackeys to Washington-- that they did not immediately condemn and bring to an end the mass murder of innocents-- babes, mothers and old people in Eastern Ukraine! Shameless and scandalous beyond words, that august European and global organisations, ignored and trampled the Statutes of the Geneva Convention protecting and guaranteeing the inalienable rights of all human beings-- especially in cases where civilians suddenly find themselves in the middle of a warzone, but instead in this instance was referred to as "untermenschen"! What a total betrayal of what the UN Charter stands for!!
Europe owes Russia apologies and in every language! Just hope they replace their forked tongues with tongues of truth now! And that this latest rapprochement towards Russia is genuine and not just a ruse, aimed to lure Rossiya back into the western fold and set it against China-- in other words, not another Zionist NWO setup! Because that will never work in a century of Sundays!
Russia is the country returning sanity to a filthy dirty, brainwashed and befuddled, spiritually bankrupt Western World, which has lost its way and gone berserk.