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Ukraine’s PM sceptical about Minsk agreements

Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Kiev is "ready to organise honest elections in Donetsk and Luhansk, if they comply with criteria of the OSCE"

KIEV, September 12. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk says he is sceptical about the Minsk agreements.

"I am sceptical about those [Minsk] agreements," he told the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kiev. "However, those are the only agreements we have."

The prime minister said Kiev is "ready to organise honest elections in Donetsk and Luhansk, if they comply with criteria of the OSCE."

On September 8, the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) invited representatives of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor local elections in the republic due on November 1. But OSCE rejected the invitation saying they had received an invitation from a member-country Ukraine to observe the elections due on October 25.

Local elections in certain districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions are among the provisions of the of the February 12 comprehensive action plan to fulfil the Minsk accords worked out by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France in the search for peace in the embattled eastern Donbass region.

The Kiev authorities however insist that elections in territories it doesn’t control will be held only after they regain control over the Ukrainian-Russian border. But in line with provision 9 of the Package of Measures of February 12, known as Minsk-2, the process of Ukraine’s regaining complete control over the state border in the conflict zone is to begin on the first day following local elections.