Lavrov tells West Ukraine distorts militia amnesty deal
MOSCOW. March 10 (Interfax) - Kyiv started to distort provisions of the Minsk peace deal the day after it was signed, and Moscow hopes that the West will keep this in mind, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
"Hopefully, the esteemed leaders of the Western world will keep in mind facts in their discussion of the progress in the fulfillment of the Minsk deal, and it is a fact that the Kyiv authorities said the day after February 12 that they did not commit to amnesty persons involved in the events in southeastern Ukraine in Minsk," Lavrov said at a press conference in Moscow.
"They alleged they did not undertake either political or legal commitments to take into consideration the opinion of Donetsk and Luhansk in the constitution reform. This is a direct distortion of what was written in black and white and signed by the Kyiv representatives," the minister said.
"We have heard about a Verkhovna Rada statement declaring that it would not cooperate with representatives of the self-proclaimed republics in the arrangement of local elections although the package of measures for the fulfillment of the Minsk agreements says pointblank that the elections should be held with the consent of the territories where the DPR and the LPR were proclaimed," Lavrov said.