Donetsk, Luhansk demands withdrawal of Ukraine troops — agency

World September 05, 2014, 17:14

“Now we are urging Ukraine to send an official negotiator,” it says

DONETSK, September 05. /ITAR-TASS/. Proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have presented their peace plan that envisages a ceasefire in Ukraine’s east as well as a ban on flights of combat aviation over Donbass, the Novorossiya news agency said on Friday.

Along with this, the peace plan stipulates that observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should monitor the situation in the war-gripped region.

“The security zone should be divided into five sectors and each of them will host a team of about 40 observers as well as three or four permanent and two or three mobile observation points equipped with means for communication and video registers,” the agency says in its statement.

“We are still anticipating the decision on who will present the Ukrainian side [at the Minsk talks] as it is of great importance - if it would be either [Ukraine’s former president] Leonid Kuchma or any other official representative,” a negotiator from the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said.

“Now we are urging Ukraine to send an official negotiator,” he said underlining that it “must be a person who understands the situation and has a certain status.”

Besides, Leonid Baranov, another DPR negotiator and its acting minister of state security, said that the Ukrainian troops should withdraw from the DPR.

“It must be understood that ‘artillery retracting from the cities’ - if we read between the lines - means Ukrainian troops’ withdrawal from the Donetsk region since the rapid succession of the Uragan (Hurricane) multiple rocket launcher is 35 kilometres,” he said.

At the same time, Speaker of the Novorossiya union parliament Oleg Tsarev said that DPR and LPR (Luhansk People’s Republic) expected Kiev not to use the truce as pretext for troops regrouping.

“We would like Kiev to present something more substantial,” he said. “We have already gone through the ceasefire when Poroshenko announced it but all kinds of battalions subsidised by oligarchs refused to fulfil the decision and the regular forces were regrouping.”

“As a result, we abandoned Sloviansk and the Ukrainian military besieged Lugansk as soon as the ceasefire ended,” he said.

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