Mrs. Olena Shaloput:

I apologise. The monitoring mission is absolutely effective, but it is restricted in its freedom of movement. It cannot be present everywhere because militants do not allow it. Therefore, there are many incidents on the ground in the uncontrolled areas of Ukraine. We hope monitors will now be allowed to monitor and watch over all of the Ukrainian-Russian border because this is the only way Russia can supply weapons, military troops and so on. I state in my report that there were 125 registered illegal crossings of our border. At the same time, Russia continues to supply so-called humanitarian convoys, at which our authorities have no presence. They cannot observe what is in them.

I was asked what was optimistic about the process. We must be optimistic about it, but, unfortunately, the conflict is ongoing, although we do our best to realise our commitments under the Minsk agreements. We are open to talks in any format as we wish to resolve the issue and restore peace in our country. We have a war on the territory of my country, not Russia's, and are very interested in its peaceful settlement.

I was asked my opinion on the causes of deaths. The committee will be aware that the OSCE special monitoring mission reported the effects of violations of the ceasefire regime. The report shows that in the period from 1 January until 15 July, 3,849 violations were registered from the uncontrolled side. Therefore, there is a big death toll. Of course, we are interested in stopping all of the violence because among them are deaths of our people.