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No agreement on police mission in eastern Ukraine: Kremlin

Xinhua, June 2, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Kremlin Thursday denied reports that Russia has agreed to send a police mission to eastern Ukraine.

"Allegations that there are records of the Normandy Quartet conversations somehow indicating that the Russian side agreed to the deployment of an OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) police mission are not true," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

There were no agreements on the subject, while any decisions to settle the Ukraine crisis should consider the position of representatives of the Donbass region, Peskov said, as quoted by RIA Novosti news agency.

"There is a willingness to discuss this issue (of deploying an OSCE police mission)," Peskov said, adding that the option of sending a monitoring mission to the contact line was also being considered.

On May 24, leaders of the Normandy Four, namely Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, held a telephone conversation.

According to an online statement from the Ukrainian president, the four leaders supported the deployment of an OSCE police mission in the insurgent Ukrainian region of Donbass and the beginning of consultations on the issue.

Nevertheless, an official Kremlin statement on the conversation did not mention the deployment of the police mission, but merely stressed the importance of an immediate ceasefire and start of a direct dialogue between the conflicting parties.

Peskov said then that the talk was not about sending a special police mission, but only about the possibility of arming the OSCE monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine. Endi