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The only way to settle the crisis in Ukraine’s southeast is “unconditional and immediate implementation of the Minsk agreements” that are recognized by all parties to the conflict, the Ukrainian presidential press service reported Thursday, according to TASS.

The report came after a meeting of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with a delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) led by its President Anne Brasseur.

“The meeting participants agreed that the Minsk agreements should be unconditionally and immediately implemented as they have been recognized by all parties to the conflict and are the only way of peace settlement,” the press service said.

Poroshenko said “some 600 Ukrainian servicemen are in captivity” in eastern Ukraine and in line with the Minsk deals, they need to be freed.

Over 4,000 people have lost their lives and hundreds of thousands have fled Ukraine’s southeast as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, conducted since mid-April 2014, to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics (DPR and LPR), according to UN data.

A ceasefire was agreed upon at talks between the parties to the Ukrainian conflict mediated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed his plan to settle the situation in the east of Ukraine.

Numerous violations of the ceasefire, which took effect the same day, have been reported since.