Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Feb. 28 that Russia doesn’t oppose the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping mission throughout the whole of the area of eastern Ukraine controlled by Kremlin-led military forces.
However, Putin repeated his earlier demand that Ukraine negotiate directly with the Kremlin-installed authorities in the Russian-occupied zone.
“The idea is about putting all this territory under international control. Is Russia for or against this? We are at least not against this,” Putin said at a joint press conference with the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
“But there is a need to come to an agreement with those unrecognized republics. Go and negotiate with them. No, nobody wants this,” he added.
Putin said that during his recent phone talk with German leader Angela Merkel he had agreed that peacekeepers should be deployed throughout the whole of the Russian-occupied part of Donbas, including the part of the Ukrainian-Russia border that currently only Russia controls.
He said Merkel had stressed that peacekeepers would be necessary to protect the monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who observe the entire Donbas warzone.
Putin also once again blamed Kyiv for not wanting to fulfill the demands of the Minsk peace agreement, which Ukraine was forced to sign after Russia sent its regular troops into Ukraine in August 2014 to shore up its flagging proxy forces of local collaborators, mercenaries, and Russian special forces.
Ukraine had been on the verge of defeating the Kremlin-backed forces, but its military advance was halted after Russian regular troops inflicted several serious defeats on Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine’s government has not exerted any control over the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts since then.
However, the September 2014 Minsk Peace Agreements, which were meant to bring an end to the fighting, have failed – a ceasefire has never been implemented and Russia has never withdrawn its weapons and troops from Ukraine, as the agreements demand.
The war has continued, albeit at a much lower intensity. Over 10,300 Ukrainians have been killed, and more than a million people have been displaced from their homes as a result of the fighting.
Kyiv has refused to hold direct talks with the Russian-installed authorities in the occupied areas.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said at the press conference on Feb. 28 that the UN peacekeepers would be necessary to ensure there was peace in the Donbas.
“I will do all possible to deploy the peacekeepers because now it’s the only option that would stop the killing of Ukrainians and reinstall Ukrainian sovereignty in the occupied Donbas,” he said.
