Heavy weapons pullback complete

Pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine claimed yesterday to have completed their end of a February deal with government forces to withdraw heavy weapons from the frontline as part of a truce.

"Today is the last day of the weapons withdrawal," Eduard Basurin, one of the rebel leaders told reporters in the town of Snizhne, where the separatists presented eight 120mm mortars that had been moved back from their positions.

Watched by six international monitors, the separatists towed the arms to a disused brick factory serving as an arms depot, about 90 kilometres from the rebel hub of Donetsk.

Russia, meanwhile, has agreed the OSCE should have unlimited access to monitor the latest ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, including the withdrawal of heavy weapons, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said yesterday.

Steinmeier and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov had on Friday called "on the OSCE to make a quick decision on extending the mandate of its special monitoring mission and ramping up its size to 1,000 observers" from the current 452.

"The crucial question is of course that the OSCE gets access there where it was denied access in the past," Steinmeier said after an EU foreign ministers meeting in the Latvian capital Riga.

"Yesterday in the talks in Berlin and as well as between President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor (Angela Merkel) we got the assurance at least from the Russian side that the OSCE should be guaranteed unlimited access," he added.

OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier said Friday that the group was still being denied full access to monitor the truce.

"There are areas which we simply can't reach," Zannier told AFP in Riga where he attended the EU foreign ministers meeting.

Steinmeier said he had later checked with Lavrov that the OSCE would also be allowed full access to verify the complete withdrawal of heavy weapons, a key provision in the February 12 Minsk accord brokered by France and Germany with Russia and Ukraine.