MOSCOW, February 13. /TASS/. It would be a "colossal mistake" for Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko to sign the controversial law on reintegration of Donbass, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Alexander Lukashevich said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel on Tuesday.
"I have no doubts that this document would be ultimately signed and, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a recent interview, Kiev is making a colossal mistake if he is ready to thwart the Minsk agreements. It is path towards restarting large-scale combat operations," he said.
On January 18, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, or national parliament, passed a bill titled "On special aspects of state policy aimed at ensuring Ukraine’s state sovereignty over temporarily occupied areas of Donetsk and Lugansk regions," which had been submitted by the country’s President Pyotr Poroshenko and is known as the Donbass reintegration bill. The document claims the areas not controlled by Kiev to be "temporarily occupied territories" and gives the president the right to use the armed forces inside the country without the parliament's consent. It also provides for setting up joint operation headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces to control all military units and military-civil administrations in the conflict zone. In addition, the document has no mention of the Minsk agreements.