Donetsk, Apr 20 - DAN. The draft addendum to the effective Additional Measures to Strengthen the Ceasefire in Donbass has passed its first reading, the Donetsk People’s Republic Office at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination (JCCC) reported on Tuesday following the Contact Group security subgroup talks.
“To obtain a practical result, we agreed to take Ukraine’s draft as the basis and make amendments to it, on which Ukraine insisted,” the DPR Office said. “To this end we had to re-read the proposals we sent before and “insert” them into the Ukraine-proposed document right at the session. Thanks to the fact that the Republics did not haggle over procedures, the draft addendum to the effective ceasefire control measures has passed the first reading.”
Chief monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine Yasar Cevik will send the updated version of the document to all participants for elaboration and possible finalising by the upcoming Contact Group meeting on April 28.
The package of tighter ceasefire control measures has been formally in effect in Donbass since July 27, 2020. The document bans the use of all weapons, deployment of hardware, special operations, engineer works and unmanned aerial vehicles flights.
Earlier in the day, the Contact Group subgroup on security issues had an extraordinary session via video conference. The session was requested by the DPR as strikes intensified. After the session, DPR representative in the subgroup Alexey Nikonorov said that Ukraine had rejected the Republics’ proposal on interaction at level of the JCCC in the current membership.*jk