Kurz, the foreign minister of Austria, which took over the OSCE’s rotating chair this year, arrived in Ukraine on Monday and has visited front-line areas near Mariupol, including Ukrainian positions near the village of Pishchevik, just a few kilometers from Russian-occupied territory.

The new chairman of the OSCE, Sebastian Kurz, has said that local elections in the Donbass can only be held after a complete ceasefire.

LIGA.net reports that, during a press conference in Mariupol today with the Ukrainian foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, Kurz said that a complete ceasefire should be the main condition for any local elections in the occupied territories of the Donbass.

“This must be the basis for holding free and fair elections.”

According to Interfax-Ukraine, Kurz said that the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) will expand its area of operations to cover the entire territory of the Donbass in order to properly monitor the ceasefire.

At a briefing in Mariupol on Wednesday morning, he also said one needs to be realistic about the mission’s powers. Answering a question of Ukrainian journalists about the possibility of the OSCE police mission deployment in Ukraine, he stressed the OSCE has 57 member states and all the decisions are taken by consensus. He stressed the OSCE will do everything so that the mission should operate as efficiently as possible, hold surveillance over the entire territory of Donbas so that the mission’s effort should help achieve a complete ceasefire. However, the efforts of the OSCE mission alone are not enough, the chairman of the organization said. The efforts of decision makers in Moscow, Kyiv and other countries are needed, Kurz said. The minister also noted the importance of restoring the destroyed infrastructure in Donbas, but stressed the priority of ensuring the ceasefire on both sides.

Klimkin added that Russia must provide the SMM access to the entire stretch of the border between Russia and Ukraine that is beyond government control. At the moment, Russia only allows the SMM access to two crossing points, allowing troops and hardware to cross the border elsewhere without monitoring.

LIGA reports that, with regards to the Minsk agreements, signed in September, 2014 and February, 2015, which outline a peace process including the withdrawal of heavy weaponry, the implementation of a ceasefire, return of border control to Ukraine and the holding of local elections in the Donbass, Kurz said:

“We must continue the negotiations. Minsk is the only basis on which they are being conducted,” said Kurz. According to him, there is concern with regards to the effectiveness of the Minsk agreements. “I am not satisfied with the current status-quo, but in the absence of another base document we must fulfill Minsk.”

There have been media reports, often from, but not restricted to Russian state media on several occasions in the last year, claiming that Kurz favours the weakening of sanctions against Russia.

However these reports seem to be somewhat skewed, as this StopFake article from June explains: