DPR official: Kiev sets up logistics centres instead of ending economic blockade of Donbass

The Kiev government is setting up logistics centers on the disengagement line what is practically useless in conditions of the ongoing economic blockade of the republics in Donbas, Andrei Purgin, the speaker of the People’s Council (parliament) of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said on Thursday.

“It is a PR action, which can hardly have any practical importance or which will ever be implemented,” Purgin told the Donetsk News Agency.
“At first, Kiev imposes full economic blockade on Donbas and burns trucks with goods, and then it announces plans to open logistics centres. Under the Minsk agreements, /President Pyotr/ Poroshenko can lift the blockade with a stroke of a pen enabling our enterprises to send their products wherever they want. The Minsk-2 package of measures does not say a word about logistics centres.

Purgin said that the US support for the idea of building logistics centres was an attempt to cover the Kiev-committed humanitarian crimes.
Purgin believes that it is not in Poroshenko’s interests to implement the agreements reached under the peace process. “He needs to preserve the blockade to put the squeeze on Donbas and provoke the people of Donetsk and Lugansk to leave their homes and take bribes from our entrepreneurs at border posts in order to maintain soldiers fighting in the zone of Kiev’s security operation,” Purgin stressed.

Pavel Zhebrovsky, the head of the Donetsk regional state administration, said on July 24 that a chain of trade centres would open along the disengagement line separating the parties in conflict to sell food, household appliances and medicine. The trade centers will have Oshchadbank terminals where pensioners will be able to withdraw pensions. The logistics centres, Zhebrovsky said, will be guarded by members of the National Guard and Ukraine’s State Border Service.