"On the basis of proposals formulated by the French president and the German chancellor joint work is in progress to draft the text of a likely joint document for the implementation of Minsk Accords that would incorporate proposals by the Ukrainian president and those formulated today and added by Russian President Vladimir Putin," Peskov said.

He explained that was being done "for presenting this text and these proposals for approval to all parties to the conflict."

"The work will go on and its preliminary results will be summarized next Sunday, in a Normandy format telephone conversation at the summit level," Peskov said.
He described the just-ended talks as meaningful and substantive.

"In the wake of yesterday’s (February 5) contacts by French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Kiev there followed their constructive, meaningful and substantive negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin," Peskov said.

It took Putin, Hollande and Merkel about five hours to try to find a way out of the Ukrainian crisis.

The talks proceeded behind closed doors. There was only a brief several-minute break to let photographers and TV camera crews take pictures of the event.

About one hundred Russian and foreign journalists a gathered in the Kremlin hoping to get first-hand information. Minutes after midnight presidential press-secretary Dmitry Peskov appeared in the Kremlin’s press-centre for a brief two-minute statement. He refused to answer any questions.

The European leaders had arrived in Moscow Friday afternoon for a discussion of the settlement in Ukraine. Earlier, Merkel and Hollande paid a brief visit to Kiev for a meeting with Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko. No details of the talks in Kiev were disclosed, either.

Earlier, Hollande said that he and Chancellor Merkel were bringing to Moscow some new settlement proposals, but their content was not disclosed. British media speculate that the plan is based on proposals President Putin had dispatched to the European leaders earlier.

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