Media: Ukrainian President Poroshenko stumbles into Lavrov’s meeting room at UN
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accidentally entered the Russian delegation’s negotiation room at the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly in New York, RBC reports.
The Ukrainian President stumbled into the room while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in it.
“Poroshenko spent 15 seconds in the room, after which he left it and went into the meeting hall,” the report states.
According to RBC, one Russian journalist managed to ask the Ukrainian president about the proposal to deploy peacekeepers in the Donbas. Poroshenko did not answer the question, instead saying “[I have] no answers for the Russian media, you are fake news” as he left the room.
As reported, Poroshenko said that the deployment of a peacekeeping mission with a UN mandate in the Donbas “could be a decisive factor in stopping the suffering of the Ukrainian people”.
Earlier Poroshenko said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal concerning peacekeepers was nothing more than “eyewash”. Whereas Ukraine is proposing to deploy a real UN peacekeeping mission in the Donbas, with contingents throughout the conflict zone, Putin wants to limit the mission to protection for international observers.
On March 17, Poroshenko expressed hope that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new government would help make the Donbas peacekeeping mission a reality.
However, Russia intercepted Ukraine’s initiative, proposing its own variant where the peacekeepers would only be on the demarcation line, in order to protect the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission.
Ukraine insists that peacekeepers must be placed in all the captured territory, including the border with Russia. Kyiv also objects to any Russians being part of the UN peacekeeping mission.
It is estimated that a contingent of 20,000 soldiers and 4,000 police officers from non-NATO states would be needed to stop the war in the Donbas.