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 Following the talks between Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine on
Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said "finally, all
questions have been resolved ... related to the Russian initiative
to send 300 trucks with humanitarian aid."
"Everything has been agreed with Ukraine and the International
Committee of the Red Cross," he said at a news conference in Berlin.
Russia and Ukraine have been at loggerheads over a convoy of 280
Russian trucks carrying water, food and medicine.
It has been parked for days in Russia near the border amid
objections from Kiev, which believes the convoy could be a Trojan
Horse for Russia to get weapons to the rebels - a notion that Moscow
has dismissed as absurd.
Lavrov described the situation in east Ukraine as a "humanitarian
catastrophe" and said a ceasefire was needed as civilians had been
under bombardment from the Ukrainian advance.
"We are not able to report on positive results on reaching a
ceasefire and on (a start to) the political process (to resolve the
conflict)," he told journalists.
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The four-month-old conflict in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east has
reached a critical phase, with Kiev and Western governments watching
nervously to see if Russia will use troops massed along its border
to intervene in support of the increasingly besieged pro-Russian
rebels.
Russian has repeatedly said it has no plans to invade and Lavrov
again denied Moscow is helping the rebels. He defended the military
buildup on Russia's border, saying: "We must be alert ... when
several kilometers from our border a real war is underway."
(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel and Katya Golubkova in MOSCOW and
Stephen Brown in BERLIN; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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