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Developments in eastern Ukraine

LPR leader says Minsk agreements will stop working after resumption of combat actions

Plotnitsky is certain that Kiev is doing so "not only to just disrupt the Minsk agreements as they will disrupt them at the moment they have prepared for the war."

Igor Plotnitsky Stanislav Krasilnikov/TASS

Igor Plotnitsky

© Stanislav Krasilnikov/TASS

MOSCOW, March 21. /TASS/. Kiev will backtrack on its commitments to the Minsk agreements at the moment of readiness for a war, the leader of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), Igor Plotnitsky, said on Saturday.

"Now they (Kiev) are treading water employing all possible political tricks - by approving the laws nobody of them is going to fulfil and by making populist political statements about our territory which we have allegedly occupied," the LuganskInformCentre local news agency quotes him as saying.

Plotnitsky is certain that Kiev is doing so "not only to just disrupt the Minsk agreements as they will disrupt them at the moment they have prepared for the war.".

"To announce that the Minsk agreements are buried will be possible only when the blood is shed again," the LuganskInformCentre news agency quotes him as saying. "Then we should draw a line under them. But still, there is a possibility to resolve these processes peacefully, and we have been reiterating and will be reiterating that we are ready."

On February 12 marathon talks between the Normandy Four leaders - Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko - in Minsk yielded a package of agreements, which in particular envisaged ceasefire between the Ukrainian conflicting sides starting from midnight on February 15.

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Eastern Ukraine

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Russia-China military-technical cooperation not directed against other states — diplomat

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