The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic in the eastern Donetsk region announced that its parliament has set the official border with Kiev-controlled Ukraine along the pre-conflict boundary of Donetsk region.

That Donetsk region is much larger than what the separatists de-facto control.

The new law on the border of the DPR "does not forget the people living on territories temporarily controlled by Ukraine," a representative of the separatists' parliament Vladimir Bidyovka said, according to the breakaway region's official DAN agency.

The DPR controls about one-third of the Donetsk region, an industrial mostly Russian-speaking Ukrainian region which is one of two regions where pro-Russian separatists declared independence in 2014.

The announcement comes ahead of the December 9 summit in Paris between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia's Vladimir Putin, moderated by the leaders of France and Germany, a highly-anticipated meeting aimed at ending more than five years of fighting.

Since 2014, the conflict in eastern Ukraine has left some 13,000 people dead. The Paris meeting would be the first face-to-face encounter between Putin and Zelensky, and the first summit since 2016 on the Ukraine conflict.

Control over the boundary of the breakaway area in eastern Ukraine, particularly its long frontier with Russia, is a thorny issue expected to be discussed at the summit.