MOSCOW, March 12. /TASS/. Kiev has a two-day deadline to prove its compliance with the Minsk agreements, the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, told the Donetsk news agency on Thursday.
"The Kiev authorities have two days left, if my memory does not fail me, to complete the withdrawal of heavy weapons and of all the hardware and begin implementation of a political part of the Minsk agreements," Zakharchenko said. "If they fail to do so, and prerequisites are quite evident now, they will reduce to nothing all the promises of their president and will lead to Kiev authorities’ bankruptcy."
"At present the party of war is strong in Ukraine and it pushes [Ukraine’s President Petro] Poroshenko to take steps not coordinated with the Minsk agreements," he said.
"They do not want peace in Ukraine," the DPR head said.
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Latest Ukraine peace efforts
Marathon talks between the Normandy Four leaders - Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko - in Minsk on February 12 yielded a package of agreements, which in particular envisaged ceasefire between the Ukrainian conflicting sides starting from midnight on February 15.
Simultaneously, the Belarusian capital hosted a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine involving Ukraine’s ex-president Leonid Kuchma, Kiev’s special representative for humanitarian issues Viktor Medvedchuk, the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics /DPR and LPR/ Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky, and Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov and OSCE’s envoy Heidi Tagliavini, both acting as mediators.
As a result, a package of measures was adopted to implement the Minsk agreements. The package of measures envisages the pullback of all heavy weapons by both parties to locations equidistant from the disengagement line in order to create a security zone at least 50 kilometres wide for artillery systems with a calibre of 100 mm or more, a zone of security 70 kilometres wide for multiple rocket launchers and a zone 140 kilometres wide for multiple rocket launchers Tornado-S, Uragan and Smerch and the tactical rocket systems Tochka-U.
The final document says that the Ukrainian troops are to be pulled back away from the current line of engagement and the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, from the engagement line set by the Minsk Memorandum of September 19, 2014.
Besides, according to Item 4 of the Minsk agreements, Kiev agreed that within a 30-day period of time the Verkhovna Rada parliament would adopt a draft law on a special political and economic status for certain parts in Donbass. The deadline expires on March 14.