KYIV, Jan 28 – The UN will play the key role in providing security and organizing elections in eastern Ukraine, according to a new peace plan suggested by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The plan, drafted by Martin Sajdik, special representative of the OSCE on Ukraine crisis, is supposed to replace Minsk ceasefire agreements that had failed to end war in Donbas.

“We have seen that the Minsk agreements are not entirely clear. The important point is that the implementation of the central element - the holding of local elections - requires outside help. We conclude that it can only be the UN,” Sajdik said in an interview with Kleine Zeitung, an Austrian newspaper.

The plan has to be approved by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, a group known as the Normandy format, which has sought to ease tensions between Russia and Ukraine since June 2014.

Russia has persistently rejected an idea of sending massive UN peacekeeping force to occupied territories in Ukraine. The new plan seems to grant not only security, but also political and economic role to the UN.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier this month said that Donbas “will not surrender” to accept the peacekeepers. He urged Kyiv to directly engage in talks with rebels that Western powers and Ukraine believe are controlled by Moscow.

The idea to send the peacekeeping force to the occupied areas was originally suggested by Kurt Volcker, U.S. special envoy for Ukraine negotiations, as the first step in de-militarizing the region.

Western countries support sending the peacekeeping force to Donbas in order to stop the fighting and start the process of re-integrating the occupied areas back into Ukraine.

Sajdik said the new plan will probably require less than 20,000 UN peacekeepers, but did not elaborate. He also said the plan must be approved by parliaments in Ukraine and Russia to assure greater ‘political weight’ to the peace process.

"There is a need for an agreement that will really have a political and legal weight,” Sajdik said. “The Minsk agreements have not been ratified by either Ukrainian or Russian parliaments, and this, of course, is a problem.”

“Our idea is to get the political weight that everybody can rely while implementing the document that must also be approved by parliaments,” Sajdik said.

The Minsk agreements, reached in September 2014 and February 2015 respectively, are designed to peacefully end the conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014.

They envisage a ceasefire, a withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the contact line, a prisoner exchange and local elections, among other measures. (tl/ez)