KYIV. June 6 (Interfax) - The Ukrainian government forces should stop firing in Donbas only after a United Nations peacekeeping force is deployed in the territories not currently controlled by Kyiv, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, currently the leader of the European Solidarity party, said on Thursday.
"We have been saying clearly since 2015 about the need for the UN Security Council to immediately authorize the deployment of a peacekeeping contingent. This is when the firing should be stopped without the right to return fire. Because there will be peacekeepers on the line of contact and throughout the entire occupied territory, who will disarm illegal armed units," Poroshenko said at a news briefing.
Poroshenko said he regretted that he did not hear anything about a peacekeeping force or an appeal to Ukraine's allies in the international coalition to speed up the issuance of a UN Security Council mandate for sending a peacekeeping force. He argued that this would be the only reliable instrument to settle the problem now.
None of the 19 ceasefire periods declared earlier in eastern Ukraine implied that the Ukrainian troops would have no right to self-defense, Poroshenko said.
The very way the right to return fire has been called into question is provocative, Poroshenko said. "As someone cleverly said today, it's the same as if our soldiers were put before a firing squad," he said.
Leonid Kuchma, Kyiv's delegate to the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk, said following the group's meeting on Wednesday that the agreements reached included the indication of not only the moment of declaring a ceasefire in Donbas but also a mechanism of its enforcement.