Russia says U.S., Ukraine reject its UN proposal for Donbas

As reported earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin this month suggested armed UN peacekeepers be only deployed to eastern Ukraine along the line of contact between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian forces, aimed to help protect OSCE monitors, Reuters reports.

Putin later said they could also be deployed in other areas where OSCE inspectors work.

However, Washington and Kyiv want peacekeepers to be deployed along the whole conflict area, that is including parts of Ukraine’s border with Russia which Kyiv does not control at the moment.

Read alsoPoroshenko to raise issue on peacekeepers in Donbas at UN General AssemblyTASS cited Vasily Nebenzia, Moscow’s envoy to the UN, as saying on Monday the United States and Ukraine had formally told Russia in the United Nations Security Council that they were unwilling to work on Moscow’s draft resolution on the subject because they had too many objections to it.

“The U.S. and Ukrainian delegations said after the first discussion that they were not ready to work on the [Russian] text in future,” Nebenzia was cited as saying.

“[They said] they had significant objections and that, possibly, the Ukrainians would have a counter proposal to deploy peacekeepers to Donbas.”

Moscow was not abandoning its own proposal, however, said Nebenzia, saying it would continue to advance it when the conditions were right.

Read alsoRussia's proposal on peacekeepers in Donbas to further divide Ukraine, not resolve conflict – VolkerUkraine has advocated an alternative plan that would ban any Russian nationals from taking part in a peacekeeping mission which it wants deployed along the part of its border with Russia which it does not control, an idea Moscow has so far baulked at.