Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavlo Klimkin yesterday cast doubt on hopes that a UN-backed truce with pro-Russian rebels will stick, as he called for an expansion of international monitoring.
“The situation on the ground is very difficult and tense despite a declared ceasefire. We still have many shells thrown by terrorists” in eastern Ukraine, Klimkin told reporters in Tokyo.
“There was always a problem of lack of trust in relations between Ukraine and Russia ... we can’t rely on any kinds of agreements between us and Russians,” he said. “And exactly because of that we need [a] consistent position of the whole international community for defending Ukraine peace and Ukrainian territorial sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Photo: AFP
Klimkin — who is in Tokyo on a two-day trip for meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his counterpart Fumio Kishida — made the comments a day after the US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov expressed cautious optimism following talks in Geneva.
Kerry and Lavrov both said a Feb. 15 ceasefire was on the right track, despite repeated breaches.
Both sides have begun to pull back some heavy weaponry from the frontline, but monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have said it is too early to confirm a full pullback.
“What we need is, of course, at least a minor confidence and it could be provided by stopping any kind of shelling... and clear monitoring and verification by the OSCE monitoring mission,” Klimkin said.
“We’ve been working on an additional stabilization component — it could be a UN mission, it could be a EU mission or [both] of them,” he said.
However, he said no normalization of ties Ukraine and Russia is likely unless the region of Crimea, now under Russian control, is returned to Kiev’s sovereignty.
He also said the border between Ukraine and Russia needed to be completely closed to achieve any settlement to the armed conflict.
“There could be no slightest way of normalizing or getting back to business in the relations between Ukraine and Russia without returning to status quo and establishing full Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea,” Klimkin said. “Because everything that has been destabilizing the situation in [the Ukrainian cities of] Donetsk and Lugansk — mercenaries, money, weapons, heavy weaponry, and of course Russian rebel troops — came through the Russian-Ukrainian border.”
Klimkin is meeting Abe and Kishida to discuss a range of issues, including Tokyo’s support for Kiev over the crisis and strengthening economic ties.
Meanwhile, three Ukrainian servicemen were killed and nine were wounded in the previous 24 hours in the country’s east, a Ukrainian military source told Reuters on condition of anonymity yesterday.
A Ukrainian military spokesman earlier in the day said that rebels had shelled Ukrainian positions 22 times over the past day.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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