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UN Security Council’s voting on Ukrainian resolution delayed

According to the sources, the vote has been delayed due to amendments introduced in regard to the document

UN, February 16. /TASS/. UN Security Council’s voting on the Ukrainian draft resolution regarding approval of the recently concluded Minsk agreements has been delayed, diplomatic sources said.

According to the sources, the vote has been delayed due to amendments introduced in regard to the document.

Britain’s UN envoy Mark Lyall Grant said the diplomats were unable to vote on the resolution on Sunday night due to pending amendments to the document.

Permanent Representative of Malaysia to the UN Security Council Hussein Haniff said members of the global organization were waiting for the Russian side to voice its approval for the amendments before the voting could start.

A UN Security Council diplomat told TASS over the weekend that a draft resolution on the Ukrainian crisis settlement had been initiated by Russia.

"The document welcomes the results of the talks in Minsk and includes a call for the parties to be committed to implementing them," he said.

The 16-hour marathon summit talks of Normandy Four leaders - Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel - were held in the Belarusian capital of Minsk last Thursday.

The Minsk key negotiations, which started at 8:15 p.m. Moscow time (17:15 GMT) on Wednesday, lasted for around 16 hours. The high-ranking participants of the marathon talks in Minsk agreed on ceasefire from midnight, February 15.

The ceasefire agreement reached at the talks in Minsk this week was not the first during the military conflict in Ukraine, which erupted less than a year ago. The previous ceasefire between Kiev authorities and defense forces of the self-proclaimed republics in the southeast of Ukraine was reached in September with the mediation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The ceasefire was agreed upon on September 5 at talks between the parties to the Ukrainian conflict as well as the OSCE representatives. It was reached in the Belarusian capital Minsk two days after Russian President Putin proposed his plan to settle the situation in the east of Ukraine.

However, numerous violations of the ceasefire, which took effect the same day, have been reported since. The situation in the southeast of Ukraine deteriorated further with the start of this year as military clashes intensified resulting in numerous casualties on both conflicting sides.

The deterioration in Ukraine prompted a diplomatic blitz from Hollande and Merkel last week as they went first for talks with Poroshenko in Kiev on Thursday and then met with Putin in Kremlin the other day.

Minsk also hosted the meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine involving Ukraine’s ex-president Leonid Kuchma, Kiev’s special representative for humanitarian issues Viktor Medvedchuk, the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky, and Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov and OSCE’s envoy Heidi Tagliavini, who both acted as mediators.