KIEV, July 31, 22:36 /ITAR-TASS/. Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko on Thursday welcomed parliament’s decision to support the 2014 budget cuts to be able to finance the costly security operation in southeast Ukraine.
“For the moment, the parliament’s attitude to the army and the Ukrainian people does not depend on whether there is a coalition in parliament or not,” the president said in his speech in parliament.
The Ukrainian state is spending 70 million hryvnias (about 6 million dollars) on the security operation in Eastern Ukraine every day.
“We are waging an offensive in the east on all the fronts. The fact that we are supporting our servicemen is the backlog of our victory,” Poroshenko said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military command has promised to end the security operation in southeast Ukraine by September. Though Ukraine’s army Chief of Staff Viktor Muzhenko refused to give any concrete dates, he made it clear that will happen in less than a month.
“I would not speak about any exact date but the operation’s active phase will be over quite soon…In less than a month, perhaps,” Muzhenko said in an interview with the Novoye Vremya (New Times) magazine.
He said Ukraine did not need any full-scale mobilization, which was recently supported by parliament, any longer. “We need mobilization but on a much narrower scale than initially declared. We may eventually reduce the number of draftees,” Muzhenko told Novoye Vremya.
The press center of Ukraine’s “anti-terror” operation said on Thursday that Ukrainian troops would announce a 6-hour ceasefire every day to enable the people of Lugansk to leave the besieged city. The evacuees will be sent to a filtration camp in the village of Schastye where they will meet Ukraine’s Interior Ministry officials.
The leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics have been calling for safe corridors for civilians for a long time. On July 5, the Ukrainian army opened fire at ambulances that were evacuating the wounded from the town of Slavyansk despite the Kiev authorities’ promise to create safe corridors.
Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov has repeatedly demanded the creation of safe corridors for children trapped in the war zone.