August 5, 2016

More

“This is not a ‘frozen conflict’ if one day two people are killed and the next day three. On the contrary: The security situation is deteriorating. …

“There are still problems of access for the OSCE observers. Ninety percent of those access denials are committed on territory controlled by Russia. Three unmanned aircraft have been shot down recently. In two cases we have images that prove that weapons of Russian origin were used to shoot down the UAVs [drones]. The objective remains to restore Ukrainian control over the territory of the entire state. Russia is still far from implementing the obligations under the Minsk Agreement. …

“We must not yield to the argument that the sanctions don’t work and we should therefore lift them. On the contrary: if sanctions do not work, they should be strengthened. …Sanctions can only be effective – and they were – if we remain united. We have to bring back the debate about why those sanctions were implemented. They were implemented in response to the worst violation of European security principles since the end of the Cold War. This principle is: You cannot change international borders by force.”

– U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, in a July 31 interview with the Austrian paper Der Standard on July 31, as reported by the U.S. Embassy Kyiv.

Comments are closed.