Eurasia Press & News
The Kiev meeting took place in shorter than one week after Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs and his Ukrainian colleague had met in Moscow and discussed the Transnistria topic.
Russian Federation’s Representative at the Transnistrian conflict negotiations, Ambassador-at-Large Valery Nesteroushkin, and Ukrainian President’s Special Representative for Transnistrian settlement, Victor Kryzhanovsky, held a consultative meeting in Kiev (Ukraine).
They focused their main attention on the present-day situation in the breakaway region and on practical questions of interaction between the international mediators [Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE] and mediators [the European Union and the United States] on resuming the negotiation process with participation of political representatives from the Republic of Moldova and Transnistria.
The Kiev meeting between Nesteroushkin and Kryzhanovsky took place in shorter than one week after Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov and his Ukrainian colleague Peter Poroshenko had met in Moscow and discussed the Transnistria topic.
Poroshenko regards his country’s relations with Moldova and the problems faced by Transnistria as issues very important for Ukraine because the country’s next-door neighbor, Transnistria, continues to be a so-called ‘hot spot’ – a problematic, explosive formation with an internationally unrecognized government and a large number of local residents having the Ukrainian citizenship.
In his recent interview with Echo of Moscow radio, Poroshenko remarked that in 2005 Ukraine and Russia used to have a very constructive dialog on an agreed-on overcoming the Transnistrian crisis.
“Now we have agreed upon a return to the practice of joint coordination of efforts to settle the Transnistria conflict. I am not ruling out that our Russian-Ukrainian groups may work out proposals on a commission in a format acceptable for both Chisinau and Tiraspol, because they have stated today the 5+2 format is acceptable to them. I am not ruling out the adoption of agreed-on statements that would promote the solution of this conflict. Its chief victims are the residents of Transnistria. They have the lowest living standards. They suffer serious restrictions of their rights and freedoms, for instance the freedom of movement. Besides this, there are tremendous military warehouses stuffed with [Russian] ammunition in Transnistria, and we systematically hear a constantly repeated thesis about [Tiraspol’s] policy of arms smuggling and arms exports… We cannot indeed tolerate such a threat to our security remaining next to our border”, said the Ukrainian foreign minister.
He stressed Ukraine is interested in resolving this problem and regards Russia as its partner in coordination of efforts aimed at problem resolution.
