LUHANSK, 9 March. /TASS/. Kiev is four days behind the schedule of withdrawal of heavy weapons, envoy to the Contact Group on settlement of the crisis in Ukraine representing the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) Vladislav Deinego told a news conference on Monday.
"Ukraine is four days late, as March 7 is a benchmark, where the Ukrainian side was to have competed withdrawal of Tornado, Uragan, Smerch and Tochka U rocket launchers" he said.
The envoy said the LPR and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) on March 4 informed the joint commission about their completed withdrawal of heavy weapons; no report of the kind was received from Kiev though.
"As of March 9, we have no information about Ukraine’s fulfilling the schedule. There have been no remarks from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on how Ukraine was working to implement weapins withdrawal by March 7. The parties to the Contact Group have no such information either. Videoconference that were due to be held have been cancelled," he said.
He said today’s shelling of the Pervomaiskaya mine demonstrated that the Kiev side had not pulled 120 mm mortars from the vicinity of the town of Zolotoye, "The firing distance of these weapons is five kilometres," Deinego added.