UN mission to come to Ukraine to assess possibility of starting mine clearance in Donbas

A mission of UN experts is expected to visit Ukraine to assess the possibility of starting mine clearance work in Donbas, Ukrainian Permanent Representative to the UN Volodymyr Yelchenko said.

"The mission is coming on January 23, and it will be working for two weeks," Yelchenko said on the Ukrainian television Channel Five on Tuesday evening.

So far the matter does not imply the deployment of a full-format UN peacekeeping mission, he said.

"This mission will come, see, do some calculations, and make conclusions, and after that, a small coordinating staff will be set up in Ukraine to start [the] work," he said.

The decision has been made by the UN Secretariat, and the organization is ready to allocate significant funding for this work, he said.

Yelchenko said he hoped that, along with Kyiv, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics (DPR and LPR) would also be interested in mine clearance and that there would be no problems with that.