Vladimir Putin warns US over arming Ukraine forces
Vladimir Putin warns US over arming Ukraine forces:- Russian president Vladimir Putin has warned that the conflict in eastern Ukraine could spread if the US were to supply weapons to Kiev’s armed forces.
The self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine had seized a lot of weapons from their opponents and it would be hard to say how they would react if American weapons also entered the conflict zone, Mr Putin said.
“Maybe they will send the weapons they have to other conflict zones where it will be painful for those who give them trouble,” the Russian president added.
Mr Putin’s remarks, at a summit of Brics nations in Xiamen, China, came after Jim Mattis, US defence secretary, signalled support during a visit to Kiev last month for the idea of giving Ukraine weapons. It is however unclear whether US President Donald Trump has any appetite for such a deeper involvement in the conflict.
Mr Putin also said Moscow intended to draft a resolution for consideration by the UN Security Council on a UN peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine.
Mr Putin said the mission would protect monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, who observe the shaky ceasefire under the Minsk agreements and have repeatedly been attacked in the territories controlled by pro-Russia separatists. The Ukrainian government has long called for a UN-backed mission to uphold a lasting ceasefire in the conflict, which has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 2014.
While Mr Putin said he would instruct the foreign ministry to draft a resolution and that a mission “would benefit the solution of the problems in south-eastern Ukraine”, he spelt out conditions that observers believe would undermine the mission.
“These forces must be deployed . . . on the line of demarcation and not on any other territories,” Mr Putin said.
The demarcation line, or contact line, is where Russia-backed separatist fighters and the Ukrainian army have clashed and are supposed to have been separated under the Minsk ceasefire.
Such a design would leave the OSCE monitors vulnerable elsewhere in the separatist territories, including on Ukraine’s border with Russia.
One of the key provisions of the Minsk agreements that remains unfulfilled is returning control over the border to the Ukrainian government.
The Kremlin’s move was swiftly rejected and portrayed as a poisoned chalice by officials in Ukraine, whose pro-western president Petro Poroshenko is expected to make his own peacekeeping mission proposal at this month’s UN General Assembly.
Iryna Gerashchenko, Ukraine’s deputy head of parliament and representative in the Minsk peace talks, said: “Peacekeepers must be introduced to all territory occupied by the Russians to monitor the security situation and demilitarise . . . their mandate must end on the Ukrainian-Russian border.”
She wrote on Facebook: “In the best traditions of hybrid war Putin is turning everything upside down by trying to distort the idea of Ukrainian leadership regarding peacekeepers in the Donbass.”
Noting that Mr Poroshenko had first appealed to the UN for a peacekeeping mission in March 2015, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said: “Russia has since as an aggressor state constantly sabotaged Ukraine’s proposals, refusing to consider our appeal to the UN Security Council.”
Addressing Mr Putin’s warning not to provide defensive weapons to Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchynov, the country’s national security chief, said the Russian president was trying to “scare the United States and international community”.
He described Mr Putin’s threat that Russian arms funnelled into Ukraine’s breakaway far east “‘can be sent to any hotspot of the world’” as “testimony to Russia’s readiness to demonstratively continue financing and provision of weaponry for global terrorism”.
Source:- https://www.ft.com/content/ef84296a-9240-11e7-a9e6-11d2f0ebb7f0
