Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos participated in today’s EU Foreign Affairs Council (FAC), in Brussels, which focused on the situation in Ukraine. Yesterday evening, Mr. Venizelos attended a working dinner of the 12 Foreign Ministers of the Party of European Socialists. The President and Foreign Minister of the Swiss Confederation, Didier Burkhalter, who currently chairs the OSCE, participated in and briefed the first session of today’s FAC.
In his intervention, Mr. Venizelos stressed, among other things, the following:
“The Roadmap presented by the Swiss Chairmanship of the OSCE is ambitious, but it is the only coherent, systematic, balanced and practical plan we have. I therefore congratulate and support Didier Burkhalter.
The critical issue now is for us to protect the Roadmap. The first thing we need to do is to clarify the official Russian stance on the so-called referenda that were held yesterday. I think it would be useful for Didier Burkhalter, in contact with the Russian government, to clarify the precise meaning of the Kremlin’s statement that it “respects” the results and hopes they are taken into account in the necessary dialogue, while also stressing the need for mediation, without using the word “recognition”. Let’s hope that wasn’t by chance.
The second point is the need not just for fair and transparent elections to be held on 25 May, but also for all of these eastern populations to participate. A high rate of abstention will create a problem of legitimization and recycle the tension. The third point is for what President Putin stated during President Burkhalter’s visit to Moscow to be done: withdrawal of troops from the borderline.
On the other hand, the government in Kiev needs to ensure that there is no form of aggressive violence from the armed forces and, even more so, that collateral mechanisms are not used. Moreover, at the soonest possible time, the inclusive dialogue must be initiated with all of the social, political, ethnic and linguistic groups, and with all the regions, on a constitutional solution that ensures sovereignty, integrity and the participation of everyone.
Finally, apart from the four pillars of the Roadmap (ceasefire, de-escalation of tension, dialogue, elections), there is also the pillar of the economy and economic stability, without which everything else is at risk.”
May 12, 2014