Kiev's Request for Peacekeepers Screen for Military Build-Up - Experts

Experts claim that deploying UN peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine would be a long process, which will eventually benefit Kiev and give it time to use military forces in the Donbass region again.

MOSCOW (Sputnik), Anastasia Levchenko — Deploying UN peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine would be a long process, which will eventually benefit Kiev and give it time to use military forces in the Donbass region again, experts told Sputnik on Monday.

In March the Ukrainian parliament approved the president's proposal for a UN peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine. Last week, President Petro Poroshenko said the issue would be on the agenda of the next meeting of Ukrainian, Russian and EU foreign ministers.

"The proposal by Kiev to introduce peacekeepers to the Donbass would be a long, complicated process, and this could only benefit Kiev," Marcus Papadopoulos, British political expert and editor-in-chief of Politics First magazine, told Sputnik.

The expert explained that the Ukrainian authorities, together with their "backers in Washington and Brussels," are aware of the geopolitical benefits that additional time may give them.

"This could provide a pretext for Kiev re-employing its military and paramilitary forces against the Donbass, which is its ultimate objective in the long-run," Papadopoulos explained.

Earlier in the day, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an exclusive interview with Rossiya Segodnya news agency expressed hope that statements made by Kiev authorities regarding the necessity of deploying peacekeepers are not a "tactical trick" intended to distract from the agreements that have been achieved.

"Any statement made by the Kiev authorities should be taken with a lot of caution, given that Kiev had no moral compunction in using violence against innocent civilians in the Donbass last year and this year," Papadopoulos continued.

Another expert also underlined that Moscow should not trust statements made by the Ukrainian authorities, as they turn out to be contradictory.

"After one year [since the conflict started] Moscow understands that it does not have any adequate partner in Ukraine to make arrangements with. At first, during the Minsk negotiations, Poroshenko was ready to yield, but then he made antagonistic statements," Stevan Gajic, research fellow at the Institute for European Studies in Belgrade, told Sputnik.

Moscow has questioned the need for international peacekeepers in Ukraine, as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe is monitoring the situation in the country under the February 2015 Minsk deal.

At the mid-February meeting in Minsk the heads of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany agreed to a set of measures aimed at facilitating the Ukrainian peace process. The military confrontation between Kiev and independence supporters has claimed over 6,000 lives since April 2014, according to UN estimates.