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UN peacemakers should protect people in Donbass — Ukraine’s ex-president

On September 5, Vladimir Putin backed deploying UN peacekeepers to Donbass

© EPA Archive/ATEF SAFADI

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KIEV, September 15. /TASS/. The future UN peacemaking mission in Donbass should, first of all, provide security for the local population, Kiev’s official representative in the Contact Group for settlement of the situation in Donbass, Ukraine’s former president Leonid Kuchma told reporters at Friday’s annual conference dubbed "Yalta European Strategy" ("YES").

"It would be wrong to propose peacemakers so that they protected peacemakers. They should protect the population, in the first instance," he said, referring to the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Donbass.

On September 5, at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order, the Russian representative delegation in the UN sent to the Secretary-General and the Chairman of the UN Security Council a draft resolution on deployment of peacemakers along the Donbass contact line to provide security for employees of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM). Putin stressed that deployment of the UN forces is possible only after withdrawal of weapons and after coordination with the self-proclaimed Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (LPR and DPR).

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