The Russian OSCE ambassador says extended Normandy Four format unlikely
to anticipate settlement in Donbass.
MOSCOW, February 6./TASS/. The pullback of military hardware in Donbass on February 5 failed to take place due to Kiev’s acts of provocation, Russia’s OSCE Ambassador Alexander Lukashevich told Rossiya 24 television.
"Of
course, there was a talk of the situation after the Contact Group’s decision on
weapons pullback by February 5. Sadly, nothing was done because of continuing
acts of provocation from Kiev that continues shelling and pulls in
hardware," he said.
According
to the diplomat, although the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission "fixes a
lot of violations on both sides," provocative activities of the Ukrainian
authorities cause a great damage to ceasefire efforts.
"The armed forces of Ukraine had clearly triggered a new spiral of tension in Donbass, to which a special report of the mission of January 30 pointed," the Russian permanent representative to the European security agency said.
"We will urge the OSCE Mission to be not a mere passive onlooker
but to act as a mechanism pushing the parties towards fulfilling their
liabilities," he said. "Even if it is not envisaged by the Mission’s
mandate, but the very logic of its activities must be based on the necessity of
not simply monitoring and verifying but also on the necessity of compelling the
parties to implement their liabilities."
"This topic [of an OSCE police mission - TASS] is not on the OSCE
agenda. It lost its topicality when no consensus was reached after certain
consultations in 2016," he said. "More to it, I know it for sure from
conversations with the heads of the OSCE monitoring mission that this idea is
seen as very dangerous, both from the point of view of personnel security and
prospects for promoting settlement."
He said that the Mission’s mandate is highly unlikely to be stopped
soon. "I have no information that anyone is interested in closing this
European, or even international, verification mechanism that is acting on
behalf of European society and even broader," Lukashevich added.
Participants of the Contact Group on settlement in Donbass agreed on
February 1 on the withdrawal of weapons and military hardware to the storage
facilities by February 5.
Normandy format
He added that extended Normandy Four format unlikely to anticipate settlement in Donbass.
"Naturally,
this topic is outside the OSCE agenda as the Normandy Four format is a higher
degree of interaction between the four countries," he said. "It is an
important instrument designed to help solve the problems of the Ukrainian
settlement."
"As
for possible extension of the Normandy format, I don’t think, and this is my
personal opinion, that it might hasten settlement in any way, at least
now," he said. "It’s more likely that the Ukrainian partners would
seek to enhance their positions thanks to the West’s influence and would try to
rebuild the entire logic of political settlement."
According
to the Russian diplomat, the Normandy format has become one of the driving
forces of the entire settlement process.
Source: ITAR-TASS 07-02-2017
