UNITED NATIONS, March 13. /TASS/. The UN Secretariat confirmed on Friday they received a preliminary request from Kiev on deploying peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine.

Spokesman for UN Secretary General Stephane Dujarric told reporters on Friday that the letter was received on February 23 underlining the world organization’s Security Council would make a relevant decision on sending the "blue helmets" to Ukraine, but not the secretary general.

On Thursday Russia’s Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin told TASS that Kiev’s idea to send peacekeepers to Donbas is a "propagandistic thing that even Ukrainians themselves do not know how to treat."

Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, acting at the request of President Petro Poroshenko, came out with an idea of asking the UN Security Council and the European Union to dispatch an international peace-keeping police mission in the east of the country. And not only between the militias and government forces, but also on that part of the border between Ukraine and Russia that Kiev does not control at the moment.

Russia’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, has voiced surprise over Kiev’s latest initiatives.

"The fact that some other schemes begin to be proposed at once, the question arises whether there is the real intention to comply with the Minsk Accords," surprised Churkin said.

The militias have firmly opposed Poroshenko’s initiative. The speaker of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s legislature, Andrey Purgin, has declared that discussing the possibility of peacekeepers’ presence in Donbas would be premature. "If we really need some kind of peacekeepers, we would like them to be Russian. But at the moment the control function belongs to the OSCE. So the proposed measure is premature," Purgin said.