Kremlin: the deployment of UN monitors on the Russian border violates the Minsk agreements
Moscow believes that the Ukraine’s insistence on the need to place the UN peacekeeping mission primarily on the Russian-Ukrainian border violates the sequence of the stages of the Minsk agreement, as stated by the official spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.
"Immediately after the introduction of the Russian draft resolution, it was distorted in much of Ukrainian mass media, and presented completely differently," Zakharova said. “One of the serious problems in the resolution is the security of the OSCE observers. With this in mind, on September 5, we submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council, according to which a UN mission equipped with small arms would be deployed to protect the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission."
"A fundamentally important point is that the UN Security Assistance Mission should not replace the contact group or the Normandy Quartet,” Zakharova stressed. “In addition, it is important that a number of conditions are observed. The mandate of the mission should be clearly limited by its function, the mission’s arrival should only be after both the parties and the equipment are withdrawn, and (that should happen) only with the consent of the parties."
"The demands from Kyiv that the mission should be deployed in all territories of the DPR and LPR, including along the entire border with Russia, will lead to the scrapping of existing formats and the sequence of steps on the Minsk agreements," the diplomat noted.
Zakharova noted that control over the border is the final point of "Minsk-2".
Russian President Vladimir Putin had said that peacekeepers might be appropriate in the Donbas, but only on the line of demarcation.
On September 8, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia proposes to introduce to the Donbas not UN peacekeepers, but rather protection for OSCE observers.