DONETSK. Sept 5 (Interfax) - The proposal to send UN peacekeepers to Donbas needs to be discussed, but Kyiv should stop firing and withdraw its heavy weapons, self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) head Alexander Zakharchenko said.
"The Russian president's proposal that the UN Security Council consider the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Donbas needs to be discussed," Zakharchenko told Interfax.
Russian President Vladimir Putin "reasonably pointed out that, before starting to talk about peacekeepers, Kyiv has to implement at least that part of the Minsk Agreements that concerns security; that is, it should stop shelling and withdraw its heavy hardware to the agreed distance. It's only then that it'll make sense to talk substantively about peacekeepers as guards of the OSCE monitors," Zakharchenko said.
"Otherwise, if Ukraine's weapons remain on the disengagement line and Kyiv keeps on behaving the way it is today, peacekeepers might be targeted by the Ukrainian side for provocations," he said.
"In any case, we stand ready to discuss the given initiative and insist that, without the DPR's and LPR's [the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic] endorsement, no changes to the settlement format are possible," he said.
"As far as I understand, the matter concerns UN peacekeepers exclusively as guards of the OSCE mission members, who, on the one hand, are scared, and on the other, do not want to be armed with firearms themselves. We have said repeatedly that we are prepared to ensure security of the OSCE mission and its monitors. But the OSCE disagrees to accept our assistance. Let's see how the UN Security Council and the OSCE respond to the draft resolution that Russia is planning to submit to the UN Security Council," he said.
The people of Donbas are interested more than anyone else in starting the process of settling the conflict with Kyiv so that people stop being killed, and therefore, to attain this end, the DPR authorities are willing not only to consider any initiatives but also come up with their own, Zakharchenko said.