Minsk Peace Plan Has Chance of Success, Says Senior Rebel

A senior separatist from eastern Ukraine said on Monday he believed there was a chance a peace plan for eastern Ukraine could succeed.

"The agreements will be carried out, but with great difficulty," Andrei Purgin, the deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, told Agence France-Presse.

"Show me a conflict that stopped simply because some document was signed. That just doesn't happen. Nevertheless, movement has started. Movement is continuing, it will continue."

"There is a chance. We need to work on it and then there will be an even greater chance."

The nine-point memorandum signed early Saturday in the Belorussian capital Minsk by representatives of Kiev and Ukraine's separatists aims to protect the fragile ceasefire by establishing a 30-kilometer (19-mile) buffer zone along the current frontline.

Purgin said he was not sure whether the Organization for Security and Co-Operation (OSCE) in Europe would be ready to play the role set out for it in the memorandum, however.

"In the memorandum we give them monitoring functions but we need to find out whether they are ready to take them on. 

"I'd like to see the 500 OSCE monitors who are supposed to come here," Purgin said, adding that in his view the OSCE mission in eastern Ukraine has so far been too small.

The OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine is currently made up of 250 observers, 80 of whom are based in five cities in eastern Ukraine. 

The international observer group plans to increase the numbers to 500 throughout Ukraine by the end of November and to start using drones there.

The spokesman for the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine, Michael Bociurkiw, said that the organization did not yet know how the buffer zone would be organized, although Russian media has reported it could be divided up into five sectors.

"There is no apparent implementation plan in the document. 

"We are seeking more clarification. All the same, our monitors in the region are continuing with their daily patrols, monitoring the general security situation," Bociurkiw said in written comments to AFP.