Ukraine Wants Crimea Back From Russia in 2016
Ukraine hopes to resume in 2016 the control of the pro-Russian rebel East and wants to create an international mechanism involving Brussels and Washington to retrieve Crimea, the Ukrainian region that was annexed by Russia in 2014, said on Thursday the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko.
In 2016, Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored in the occupied territories of the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, where armed conflict has claimed more than 9,000 lives since April 2014, said Mr. Poroshenko, while promising to use only political and diplomatic means to achieve this.
As for Crimea, annexed by Russia in March 2014, Kyiv intends to propose to create an international mechanism to end the occupation of the peninsula, added the Head of State which recently announced his priorities for 2016.
The optimal size would be + Geneva + with the participation of our partners in the European Union and the United States and perhaps the countries that signed the memorandum of Budapest, Russia, Britain and the United States, who had vouched for the sovereignty of Ukraine in 1994 after the former Soviet republic had abandoned its nuclear weapons, he said.
Moscow and Kyiv are mired in an unprecedented crisis since the coming to power of pro-Western officials in Ukraine in early 2014, followed by the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in the wake of a disputed referendum and the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the East.
Kyiv and the West accuse Russia of arming the separatists and of deploying Russian troops to the conflict zone, the bloodiest in Europe since the wars in the Balkans in the 90s.
Moscow vehemently denies the charges, but its role in the Ukrainian crisis has earned the country some heavy economic sanctions and the worst damage to its relationship with the West since the end of the Cold War.