KIEV, March 17. /TASS/. Ukraine’s parliament has addressed the United Nations Security Council and the Council of the European Union with a plea to deploy a peacekeeping contingent in Ukraine.
The move was supported by 341 lawmakers at a Verkhovna Rada (parliament) session on Tuesday.
The document was submitted by Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, who signed on March 2 a decree to enact a resolution of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council on asking the UN and the European Union to stage an international peacekeeping operation in Ukraine.
The United Nation’s Secretariat confirmed that Kiev had filed a request for a peacekeeping contingent at the end of last week.
Poroshenko said deployment of an international peacekeeping contingent would promote efficient implementation of the Minsk agreements on the backdrop of a tense security situation in Donbas "with a perspective of further disintegration and loss of trust within the framework of the entire peace process." The document noted the role of the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as a parallel monitoring instrument.
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Kiev plans to deploy peacekeepers along the line of engagement between the Ukrainian troops and militias of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) and along sections of the Russian-Ukrainian border that are not controlled by the Ukrainian government.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said earlier it might take from six to seven months to deploy an international peacekeeping mission in the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine. He said there was understanding among member countries of the United Nations Security Council that "we must look at options of peacekeeping activities." "The problem is that it will take six to seven months to deploy a [peacekeeping] mission. It might be a United Nations peacekeeping mission, a European Union mission, a police mission," he said, adding that it would be more difficult from the political point of view to deploy peacekeepers from the European Union, since it would require a United Nations mandate in any case.