MOSCOW, August 28. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko deliberately fails to comply with the terms of the "school year" truce in the Donbass region to get additional arguments in favor of the initiative to deploy the UN peacekeeping mission to the region amid the deteriorating situation, Alexey Chesnakov, Director of the Russian Center for Current Politics, told TASS on Monday.
"The fact that the Ukrainian side has violated the ‘school year’ ceasefire on numerous occasions over the past three days shows that Poroshenko intends to cynically use these provocations by the Ukrainian armed forces as an argument at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting to push through his proposal deploy the organization’s peacekeeping mission to the zone of conflict between Kiev and Donbass," the expert said.
Chesnakov explained that the Ukrainian president wants to show the OSCE’s inability to cope with its mission to resolve the conflict. "Poroshenko is deliberately provoking the failure of the ‘school year’ truce in his own political games. This should be taken into account during further talks with the 'Normandy Four' countries (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine) within the Minsk process," he stated.
On August 23, members of the Contact Group on the settlement in eastern Ukraine agreed on another truce in the Donbass region as of midnight on August 25 timed for the beginning of new school year. However, ceasefire violations persisted. In the afternoon on August 25, representatives of the self-proclaimed Donbass republics said their territories had again been shelled by the Ukrainian armed forces.