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Developments in eastern Ukraine

UN Security Council meets on Friday to discuss situation in Ukraine

The meeting is expected to focus on a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the situation on Ukraine, which was presented in Geneva on Monday

© EPA/ITAR-TASS

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More than 6,000 killed in conflict in Ukraine’s east — UN

UNITED NATIONS, 5 March. /TASS/. The UN Security Council will hold the next session on Ukraine on Friday to discuss political settlement in Donbas, the situation with human rights as well as humanitarian situation in the country, a spokesman for the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations told TASS on Wednesday.

It will be an open meeting, scheduled for 10 am (15 pm GMT), French mission spokesperson Thierry Caboche said. An open discussion will follow the session, he said.

The meeting is expected to focus on a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the situation on Ukraine, which was presented in Geneva on Monday, the spokesman said.

It reports, in particular, about numerous violations of human rights during a conflict in Donbas, as well as expresses concern over the situation in Crimea which rejoined Russia after a referendum last year.

After the report was made public, the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed regrets that "not all judgments of observers can be called objective". "They keep using information from dubious sources, drawing unfounded conclusion on its basis," the ministry said.

It said "the republic of Crimea is a region of the Russian Federation in line with a free and legitimate expression of will of peninsula’s residents and is not within a mandate of the UN mission in Ukraine".

Last time, the UN Security Council met to discuss Ukraine on February 27. The meeting was held behind closed doors and the head of the OSCE special monitoring mission, Erturgul Apakan, and the OSCE envoy to the Contact Group for peace settlement in Ukraine, Heidi Tagliavini made a report to the Council members on the current situation and the pullout of armaments from the zone of conflict in war-torn eastern Ukraine.

American and British representatives at the UN Security Council were striving to rewrite Mink accords and force the monitoring mission of the European security organization OSCE in Ukraine into performing the functions that stand far outside its scope of powers, Churkin told Russian reporters after the meeting.

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