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Peacekeepers
Berlin, July 24, 2017 (dpa/NAN)President Petro Poroshenko pf Ukraine on Monday insisted on a deployment of UN peacekeepers to conflict areas near the Russian border, in a phone call on with the leaders of Russia, France and Germany.
Poroshenko described the ongoing fight in recent days between the Ukrainian military and Russian-aligned rebels in eastern Ukraine as some of the bloodiest this year, according to a statement on his website.
Twenty Ukrainian military personnel have been reported killed in the country’s east in the past four weeks.
France and Germany have been trying to mitigate the conflict, which erupted three years ago when Ukraine ousted its pro-Russian president amid mass protests calling for closer ties with the West.
Poroshenko said that French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced last week’s announcement by rebel groups that they were establishing an independent state called “Little Russia.”
Macron, Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month discussed the conflict on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in the German city of Hamburg.
Merkel referred at that meeting to the “very, very slow” progress that was being made in ending years of violence in eastern Ukraine.
All ceasefires for Ukraine’s border regions have so far failed.
According to the UN, some 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict since it started in 2014.
Monday’s phone call, in the so-called Normandy format of the four nations, was the first for Macron, inaugurated in May.
Russian media reported that the call lasted about two hours.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which independently monitors the conflict, had the head and deputy head of its Ukraine mission on the call.
During talks with Poroshenko in June, Macron called for a stronger role for OSCE monitors on the border, in the hope that they could facilitate a withdrawal of forces and ensure that all sides shared the “same reading” of what was happening. (dpa/NAN)
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Edited by Celine-Damilola Oyewole/Sadiya Hamza