KIEV, April 4 (Sputnik) — Kiev's proposal for a UN peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine will be brought up during the next meeting of Ukrainian, Russian and EU foreign ministers, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko said Saturday.
"An agreement has already been reached in the 'Normandy Format' – and this is the first time I mention it – that 'Normandy Format' foreign ministers will gather for a meeting or a conference to discuss the format, modality and timeframe of a peacekeeping [mission]," Poroshenko said in a televised interview with a local television channel.
The president's office said Wednesday that Poroshenko and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had agreed to call for a four-way meeting in the near future, though no date was mentioned.
"I hope this will lead to UN discussions at the level of mission leaders… There has already been, on my request, a round of consultations between the [Ukrainian] foreign minister and the UN Secretary-General," the Ukrainian president added.
This format is dubbed "Normandy Four" after the meeting of the four countries' leaders last summer on the sidelines of celebrations that marked the 1944 Allied landing in France.
In a surprise decision in February, Poroshenko announced he had requested UN- or EU-mandated peacekeepers to be sent to Ukraine's crisis-hit eastern regions, citing a precarious security situation there.
This was followed by a bill to the Ukrainian parliament in mid-March that asked the UN Security Council and the Council of Europe to authorize a peacekeeping mission.
Moscow questioned the need for such a mission since the Minsk deal stipulated that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was to oversee the implementation of the ceasefire.
