MOSCOW, June 25. /ITAR-TASS/. Speaker of Russia’s Federation Council upper house of parliament Valentina Matviyenko does not believe that peacekeepers should be introduced in Ukraine.

“All decisions should be made within the framework of trilateral negotiations. At his point there is no need to deploy a peacekeeping contingent there,” Matviyenko said on Wednesday, June 25, and stressed that “this is an internal political crisis in Ukraine”.

She expressed confidence that “Kiev and the south-east [of Ukraine] should find mutually acceptable solutions through negotiations”, welcomed the ceasefire in the region and warned the sides against “provocations that could wreck it”.

“No one has any illusions that the sides will shake each other’s hands tomorrow. This is a long confrontation and it has been marred by the death of hundreds of people. These wounds will have to be healed for a long time, patiently and calmly, with the sides listening to each other, substantiating their positions and finding mutually acceptable solutions,” Matviyenko said.

The leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic earlier called for sending peacekeepers to the embattled south-eastern regions of Ukraine.

Matviyenko also made it clear that no one should expect the Federation Council to allow the use of the Russian army in Ukraine again. Instead she suggested concentrating on continuing the peace dialogue in order to resolve the crisis in the south-east of Ukraine.

“I am not considering this scenario. I don’t think we should be contemplating such a possibility. We should instead exert every effort to continue the peace dialogue and look for a peaceful solution to this crisis,” she said.

However, she stressed that re “if the rights of ethnic Russians or Ukrainians who identify themselves as Russian-speaking are violated and if other human rights are violated, we have enough forms, methods and means to protect our compatriots and representatives of the Russian world”.

“This does not mean that by cancelling this resolution [adopted in March to allow President Vladimir Putin to use the armed forces in Crimea, which was part of Ukraine at that time] we will turn a blind eye to gross violations of people’s rights or threats to their security,” she said. “We will persistently look for solutions to these issues on our own and in dialogue with our Western partners and the Ukrainian authorities.