Russia rejects peacekeepers for Ukraine
February 19, 2015
Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, accused Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko late on Wednesday of putting at risk the entire peace process agreed in talks in Minsk a week ago, by calling for the deployment of UN-mandated peacekeepers to the war-torn region.
"When someone, instead of doing what he has signed up to, suggests a new scheme and so soon, that raises suspicions that he wants to destroy the Minsk accords," the state RIA Novosti news agency quoted Churkin as saying.
"If one proposes new schemes right away, the question arises if (the accords) will be respected," he added.
The pro-Russia rebels also rejected the idea of peacekeepers outright.
"This is an actual violation of the package of measures to implement the Minsk agreement," senior separatist figure Denis Pushilin told RIA Novosti.
Poroshenko had called for UN-mandated peacekeepers to be deployed to the east of Ukraine after holding an emergency session of his national security and defense council in Kyiv late on Wednesday.
"The best format for us is a police mission of the EU," a statement posted on his website said. "It will be the most efficient guarantor of security in the situation when the word of peace is not observed either by Russia or by those who are supported by it."
Debaltseve falls
Earlier on Wednesday, Ukrainian troops were forced to pull out of the disputed town of Debaltseve, where they had been trying to repel an assault by pro-Russia fighters for several weeks. The rebels had insisted that Debaltseve, which was surrounded by separatist-held territory, was not part of the ceasefire agreed to in Minsk, while Ukraine insisted that it was.
On Thursday, the Reuters news agency cited an unnamed military source in Kyiv, who said that 14 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 173 wounded in the past 24 hours. No details have yet emerged from a telephone conversation that Poroshenko had planned to hold with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande late on Wednesday.
pfd/sms (AFP, Reuters)