LVIV, October 3. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Friday the truce in Ukraine should be used to raise the country’s combat readiness.
“We should effectively use the regime of cessation of fire to improve defense installations and raise our army’s combat readiness,” Poroshenko said during a working trip to the west Ukrainian city of Lviv.
He said “Ukraine has transferred its economy to military footing and will provide everything possible for the Ukrainian army to be stronger”.
The Ukrainian president said he will “submit plans to reform the Defense Ministry and to raise Ukrainian army mobility to the Verkhovna Rada by the yearend”.
Clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions during Kiev’s military operation designed to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, have claimed more than 3,000 lives, many of them civilian, according to UN data, forced hundreds of thousands to flee Ukraine’s embattled south-east and caused massive destruction.
Talks mediated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk saw the parties to the Ukrainian conflict agree on a ceasefire.