This was announced by members of the delegation at a press conference at that country's Foreign Ministry on Friday, September 1, Total Croatia News said on Saturday, September 2.
"We have presented our experiences in the implementation of the demilitarization of territory, the establishment of a transitional police, the application of amnesty, the implementation of local elections, in short – the establishment of normal life," chairwoman of the working group Vesna Skare-Ozbolt has said.
Read alsoDonbas reintegration bill to brand Russia "aggressor state" at legislative level – Poroshenko’s envoy to RadaState Secretary at the Foreign Ministry Zdravka Busic also stressed that, when it comes to relations between Zagreb and Moscow, Croatia has "no hidden agenda" and the Croatian model of peaceful reintegration of the Croatian Danube region has drawn considerable interest from the UN in resolving the problems from Georgia and Syria.
Vesna Skare-Ozbolt believes that Croatia has a moral obligation to try to help establish peace in the Ukrainian east, and stresses that the peaceful reintegration of the Croatian Danube region was the most successful UN peacekeeping mission ever. "Moscow and Kyiv know that quite well," she said, pointing out that both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers participated in the UN peacekeeping mission in Croatia.
The visit by the Croatian delegation has caused an uproar from Russia.
Read alsoConcentration camp for Russian consciousness"However, it seems that Russia is of a somewhat different opinion," Total Croatia News said. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement about the Croatian delegation's activities in Ukraine.
"We have noted the contacts between Ukrainian authorities and former Croatian Minister of Justice Vesna Skare-Ozbolt, former Deputy Interior Minister Josko Moric and former Head of the Directorate for Expellees, Returnees, and Refugees Lovre Pejkovic who arrived from Zagreb, at the end of August in Kyiv. Judging by the information available from the media, the issues discussed at the meetings included the 'return of occupied territories' based on Croatia's experience in the 1990s. That experience is more than controversial, it is negative, to put it bluntly. Suffice is to recall the approximately 250,000 Serbian refugees, forced out of Croatia by the military operations carried out by Zagreb in 1995, and the numerous civilian casualties.
Regretfully, their assurances of 'good intentions' and 'the need to restore mutual trust' in the conflict areas were used as a guise to make dangerous statements about 'compulsion' and the 'acceptability' of certain 'methods of peaceful reintegration.' Of considerable concern is the fact that Kyiv seems eager to pick up on such signals, demonstratively ignoring its own clearly stated obligations under the Minsk Package of Measures. Therefore, any mention of scenarios for Donbas involving force would be especially damaging and immoral now, in the first days of the 'school truce' confirmed in the Normandy format," the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The Russian side has called on "Zagreb to use every opportunity to encourage Kyiv to consistently and unswervingly implement the Minsk Agreements" in the interests of expediting the peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis and durable stabilization in eastern Ukraine.
Josko Moric, a member of the working group, stressed that the visit took place within the framework of the fact that, "on the one hand, Ukraine is a subject of international-legal and political relations in its internationally recognized borders and, on the other hand, that the presidents of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and France and the German Chancellor have confirmed that they respect Ukraine's integrity and territorial sovereignty and firmly believe that a peaceful solutions to the problem has no alternative."
"What we did and said in Kyiv, we can repeat in Donetsk, Luhansk, Moscow or Berlin," Moric said.
