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Russian top diplomat believes OSCE may play important role in settling Ukrainian crisis

18 January 2017 12:19 (UTC +04:00)

"Austria is the current OSCE chair. We paid special attention to the issues of cooperation in this organization," Lavrov said after talks with his Austrian counterpart and the current OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Sebastian Kurz.

"Both Russia and Austria are convinced that the OSCE should remain an important platform for discussing approaches to all the key issues of the all-European agenda, we call for using the OSCE potential in the interests of assisting the settlement of the crisis in Ukraine," he said.

Lavrov went on to say that Russia has no objections to increasing the number of the OSCE observers in Donbass and providing them with an opportunity to carry firearms for self-defense.

"Russia is ready to increase the number of the OSCE observers deployed to the line of contact and to warehouses in Donbass," Lavrov said.

At the same time, the Russian top diplomat stressed that the idea of setting up a separate armed police mission contradicted the Minsk agreements.

"We are working on the Minsk agreements implementation encouraging everyone who signed them to fairly go their part of the way," Lavrov said.