MOSCOW, May 07. /ITAR-TASS/. A second round of Geneva conference devoted to Ukraine on which the West insists will fail without south-eastern regions of the country involved in it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Council of Europe member states in Austria’s capital, Vienna, on Tuesday. He urged the United States and Europe “not to tear apart Ukraine between the East and the West.”
“The ‘knot’ disentanglement technique similar to that in Ukraine is well-known to politicians and diplomats for a long time. First and foremost, Ukrainian government troops should be brought back to their permanent bases to lift crisis tension, because no agreements can be reached amid combat actions,” Anatoly Adamishin told ITAR-TASS.
“A second step to de-escalate current situation in Ukraine should be disarmament of illegal armed units. This was fixed in the Geneva accord on April 17. But Kiev found that the demand to lay down arms spreads only on militiamen in south-eastern Ukraine, but not on Right Sector gunmen who are included in the national guard or the army,” the diplomat added.
“A third step to political settlement is an assembly of local officials from all Ukrainian regions at which they should agree on a future constitutional system of their homeland. Instead of citizens no one will be able to agree on a Ukrainian national consensus,” Adamishin believes.
“Talks have been conducted to end the civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s. The war ended there when representatives of state authorities, opposition and even field commanders managed to have talks. Then this scheme was effective. Now it will hardly have an effect because the United States prompts Kiev to take south-eastern regions under control to hold presidential elections there on May 25. Washington and Kiev need a victory at elections whatever the cost. If Washington had urged Kiev to stop an operation in Donetsk (eastern Ukrainian city), it would have been stopped, because Kiev authorities are not independent,” he noted.
“The meeting of the foreign ministers of the Council of Europe states in Vienna on Tuesday showed that neither Russia nor the EU wants a war in Ukraine and both are seeking to overcome a crisis in political ways. The US is actually in command of the situation, as the latter seeks to provoke Moscow for a military interference to squeeze Russia in grips and to put Europe under economic control. The tragedy in the city of Odessa (Ukrainian Black Sea port city) where 46 people died in the House of Trade Unions set on fire on May 2 has pursued exactly this goal,” the expert said.
“In these conditions a second round of Geneva talks looks useless. It will vanish in the air as the first Geneva talks where all agreements were correct, but none of them was fulfilled,” Adamishin noted.
“When supporters of European integration in Ukraine were fighting against Yanukovych, the western Ukrainian city of Lviv proclaimed its independence. Washington and Brussels hailed this event. Now they call residents in south-eastern Ukraine as separatists, as the latter declared people’s republics in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The West urged Yanukovych not to use force against his opponents and now the West approves of Kiev authorities’ military operations against their own people,” the diplomat noted.
“Such ‘games’ may result in a split of the country between the East and the West, provoke a full-scale civil war and bring Ukraine to a collapse. If the EU states do not want a war in central Europe, they should not act ambiguously as they do so now,” the Russian extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador added.
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