Foreign Minister George Vella has welcomed the agreement reached in Geneva on Thursday for immediate steps to be taken towards reducing tension in Ukraine.

The US, European Union, Ukraine and Russia have agreed to establish a national dialogue to ensure that people's rights are protected.

The agreement, reached after seven hours of negotiations, could put on hold economic sanctions the West had prepared to impose on Russia if the talks were fruitless.

In a statement, Dr Vella said that when one considered the dangerous state that Ukraine had gotten into, the fact that the US, Russia, the EU and representatives of Ukraine met to negotiate an agreement was already a positive sign.

It was to the credit of those who took part that the agreement was reached, he said.

Throughout the situation, the Maltese government had always expressed its belief in the diplomatic process in all international fora and insisted that solutions to such a problem would only be found through dialogue.

The government hoped that the agreement would come into effect as soon as possible and insisted that Ukrainians should at the same time be assisted with all possible means to overcome the political, economic and financial crisis they were facing.

It believed that for this to happen, the incitement of those in favour of Russia and those who wished to remain Ukrainian against each other had to stop.