MOSCOW, March 13. /TASS/. The special envoy of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office in charge of supervising the talks on peace settlement the armed civil conflict in eastern Ukraine, Martin Sajdik, has expressed the hope the conflict will be settled before the yearend.
"If I didn’t have a hope for the solution of this conflict, then I’d probably have to pack and return home," he said in an interview with the Belarusian news portal TUT.BY.
"Now I really hope the sides will display political will and we’ll really be able to put period to the conflict in the course of this year," Sajdik said.
He stressed one more time the absence of an alternative to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk accords and voiced disagreement with the claims that the parties to conflict were not observing their provisions.
"During the talks of the Ukraine Contact Group in Minsk we managed to come to terms on various issues envisioned in the Minsk accords," he said. "By way of fulfilling the September 19, 2014, and February 12, 2015, accords, the Contact Group endorsed several decisions stipulating the ceasefire."
"It also endorsed a supplement to the accords [on September 29, 2015] on the pullback of heavy armaments and on a full ban on exercises near the Line of Contact that might involve heavy weaponry [March 2, 2016], as well as a framework agreement on the disengagement of forces and armaments," Sajdik said.
He believes the real problem lies in the absence of political will to fulfill the obligations the sides took upon themselves.