https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGvKfUm-knU (In Russian)
No armed OSCE mission in E. Ukraine
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that an OSCE armed mission to eastern Ukraine was not on the table, following the 'Normandy Four' meeting at the President Hotel in Minsk on Tuesday.
"There is no such need and today nobody has even raised such a question. No one even thinks about deploying an armed OSCE or any other mission, contrary to what Kiev has been saying from time to time. Nobody is even thinking about it," Lavrov stated.
SOT, Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister (Russian): "It is clear that these [Minsk] agreements have stalled despite the attention that has been regularly paid to these issues by the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine. At the present moment it is even impossible to agree on the sequence of steps, first of all in security matters and political reforms that must be implemented, meaning the law on the special status of certain regions of Donbass, securing this status on a permanent basis in the Ukrainian constitution and conducting local elections."
SOT, Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister (Russian): "We noted violations including situations where some of the heavy weapons had previously been withdrawn. Some of these weapons have been constantly returned to the contact line. Today we have cited the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission’s statistics; it reports far more violations by the Ukrainian armed forces. Among those is the equipment in the security zone and periodic disappearance of heavy weapons from the warehouses where they have been withdrawn to and where they were supposed to be."
SOT, Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister (Russian): "So no breakthroughs have been achieved today, but at the same time I consider it a very positive fact that the agreement of the leaders on October 19 is not in question, as it used to be earlier with the Minsk agreements and the decisions that were taken in Paris in October last year."
SOT, Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister (Russian): "The second question is irrelevant because there is no such need and today nobody has even raised such a question. No one even thinks about deploying an armed OSCE or any other mission, contrary to what Kiev has been saying from time to time. Nobody is even thinking about it."
