BERLIN, March 11. /ITAR-TASS/. Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet on Tuesday spoke out in favor of an unbiased probe into developments in Kiev, in which dozens of people had been killed.
The foreign minister was speaking after talks with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is on a visit in Tallinn. “The crimes in Ukraine that led to the murder of dozens of people, must be investigated without bias, like any other crime,” Urmas Paet said commenting on his recent telephone conversation with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton that leaked to the Internet.
In the telephone conversation, he said that “there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition”. Paet said on Tuesday he was just conveying what he had heard in Kiev.
The German foreign minister, for his part, said the European Union was trying to avoid confrontation with Russia, but Brussels would be ready to react if Moscow did not change its position on Ukrainian Crimea.
“If we see no visible changes in Russia’s position during the weekend, we will have to discuss in the European Union on Monday transition to a new stage of measures,” the minister said.
“We do not want confrontation, but actions of the Russian side make us prepare,” he said, calling the situation in Ukraine “a shared problem of the EU and NATO”.