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The Contact Group on settlement of situation in south-eastern Ukraine will hold talks on the first round of negotiations of working subgroups on Friday in Minsk, TASS reports.

The decision to launch subgroups at last Contact Group meeting on May 6 in Minsk signaled the start of a new stage in the efforts to settle the crisis.

The aim of creating subgroups lay in intensifying the peace process, working on implementing separate points of the Minsk agreements, actively discussing concrete problems, while the Contact Group is tasked with making final decisions. "Sub-groups cannot make decisions, they can only give recommendations," the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) envoy to the Contact Group Denis Pushilin said.

Meetings of subgroups on security, economic and humanitarian issues took place on May 14 and 19. The subgroup on political issues will take place today. After that, the Contact Group will discuss "the first results of work of working subgroups," according to Daria Olifer, press secretary of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who serves as Kiev’s envoy to the talks.

The main topic for the subgroup on political issues will be holding local elections in Donbass. "The law on local election in Donbass will be put on agenda for the working subgroup, and we hope that the Ukrainian side will not dodge discussing it," DPR’s envoy at talks Denis Pushilin said.

He stressed that discussing this issue cannot be postponed any longer. "That is why we made public the texts of proposed projects beforehand," he noted.