Speeches and Interviews of the Permanent Representative

Mr. Chairperson,

 

The crisis in Ukraine is still far from being resolved. The reason for this is the absence of political will on the part of the Ukrainian Government to fulfil its existing obligations. Unfortunately, apart from high-flown rhetoric about striving for peace, we have seen nothing as yet from the Ukrainian leadership, let alone practical steps towards the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

So far, the Ukrainian Government and the authorities in Donbas have been unable to achieve a meaningful relaunching and intensification of dialogue, as instructed by the Normandy format summit held in Paris in December, both on security issues and on political and humanitarian aspects. However, some grounds for hope are offered by yesterday’s meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) in Minsk, during which agreement was reached on a decision to establish an advisory board for the discussion of political and legal aspects of the implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures. We urge our Normandy format partners to become involved in facilitating the work of that board.

Unfortunately, the shooting continues in Donbas all the same. Spikes in military activity were observed on 18, 23 and 26 February and also on 9 and 10 March, as reports by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) confirm. The Ukrainian armed forces frequently fire upon residential areas, moreover using not only small arms and light weapons. We might recall, for example, the recent shelling in Zolote-5/Mykhailivka from 73 mm guns (in that case, incidentally, the SMM confirmed the direction of the shelling, which pointed directly to the involvement of the Ukrainian armed forces), or the damage caused by machine-gun fire to a residential building and a functional school building in Oleksandrivka (Donetsk region). We have taken note also of yesterday’s media reports of damage to residential buildings in Sakhanka as a result of large-calibre artillery fire, and also in Holmivskyi, which came under fire from anti-aircraft guns. Weapons and military equipment belonging to the Ukrainian armed forces were spotted in close proximity to the Marinka checkpoint.

The list of casualties of the shelling, which can hardly be called indiscriminate since civilians are deliberately being targeted, is growing. On 28 February, a resident of certain areas of Donbas who was returning home by car received a bullet wound while at the Olenivka checkpoint. Another car carrying civilians was hit by a projectile on 4 March in Dokuchaievsk, injuring a married couple. We urge the SMM to carefully record all the consequences of the use of weapons against residential areas and to catalogue data on civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian objects.