PRESS RELEASE
Putin Proposes UN Peacekeeping Troops for Southeastern Ukraine
Sept. 6, 2017 (EIRNS)—During his press conference yesterday at the BRICS summit in Xiamen, China, Russian President Vladimir Putin reported that Russia would be circulating a draft resolution at the UN Security Council on the deployment of UN peacekeepers to the Donbas region of southeast Ukraine. The peacekeepers would be deployed to provide security to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors and would only be on the line of contact between the two sides in the conflict. Such a deployment, he said, "could help resolve the situation in southeastern Ukraine." Putin also stressed that the matter of UN peacekeeping troops could only be resolved with the agreement of all sides.
"This cannot be resolved without direct contact with representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic," he said. "I believe that if all this is done, it would definitely benefit resolving the situation in southeastern Ukraine."
The Kiev regime, which is dominated by admirers of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, rejected Putin’s proposal out-of-hand, showing its commitment to its falsified version of the Donbas conflict. In this distorted view, the conflict is the result of a Russian invasion, rather than a revolt against the regime that took power by a violent coup in 2014. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry completely rejected the idea of even talking to the leaders of the two break-away republics in Donetsk and Luhansk.
"There can be no talk about receiving permission for a UN peacekeeping mission from the illegal armed formations action in Donbas, as they are supported, financed and supplied from Russia,"
the foreign ministry said in a statement. Iryna Gerashchenko, the Ukrainian representative on the Minsk group, said that the deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission along the contact line in eastern Ukraine is out of the question, as the peacekeepers should be deployed throughout the entire Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia. This is what Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been proposing since 2015.
Chairman of the Russian Federation Council Committee for Foreign Affairs Konstantin Kosachev said that Putin’s proposal will leave no loopholes for Kiev to blame Russian "aggression" for the conflict and that this is why the government is reacting as it is. Gerashchenko’s response, Kosachev said,
"shows Ukraine’s true intentions: it does not want peacekeepers, it wants some police units from the West to be deployed to the entire territory of the D.P.R. and L.P.R. under a UN mandate,"
he said.
