MOSCOW - Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said the Ukrainian crisis will hopefully have been settled before 2017, when Austria takes over the rotating presidency of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
“We hope that we will come to a peaceful settlement of the crisis in Ukraine. One should hope above all that in 2017, when Austria assumed the presidency of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, this organization will deal with totally different tasks,” Kurz said at a press conference after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on May 5.
“I hope that jointly with Germany we will manage to consider this issue [the peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine] before 2017,” he said.
Kurz spoke about the OSCE’s important role in settling the situation in Ukraine and in resolving other crises.
“The OSCE is an organization that unites all in Europe. It is a very powerful force, in my opinion, because in times of crises it can follow the situation more attentively, including the current developments in Ukraine,” he said.
