Peacekeepers across Occupied Part of Donbass will Guarantee Implementation of Minsk Peace Deal – Petro Poroshenko

A peacekeeping mission in the entire occupied territory of Donbass and on the Ukraine-Russia border should be a key lever to enforce the Minsk peace agreement, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said. Poroshenko was speaking at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) 14th Annual Meeting.

"We want peace. Therefore, we are very keen to implement our two-year-old initiative regarding the peacekeepers in Donbass. In the entire occupied territory of Donbass, we want control over the Russia-Ukraine border, no influence from the Russian military, Russian weapons or Russian munitions, in order to return peace to Donbass", - Poroshenko said.

President Poroshenko also said that he was grateful to the US and European partners for supporting this initiative. "I am very pleased to hear US Department of State representatives saying they welcome the deployment of peacekeepers in Donbass. Our European partners, France, Germany and Great Britain, they also support this idea. This is an indispensable part of the roadmap for implementation of the Minsk peace agreement", - Poroshenko said.

Poroshenko stressed that the peacekeepers are the key component of the strategy to return the occupied territory of Donbass back under Ukraine’s control.

"What was the problem of the Minsk agreement? Russia does not have any plan on how to implement it and we do not have any guarantees that Russia would keep its promise. In the framework of the Normandy group we are offering a roadmap for the procedure and guarantees for implementation of the agreement. Peacekeepers may become a tool to implement the roadmap and to implement the security package. This is the most important part of the strategy to take Donbass back under Ukraine’s sovereignty", - Poroshenko said.

The online stream of the Yalta European Strategy (YES) 14^th Annual Meeting will be available online at yes-ukraine.org as well as on the websites of our media partners, in both English and Ukrainian.

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