MINSK, 16 June (BelTA) – Work on the draft agreement on a CIS joint army engineers unit in charge of humanitarian demining was finished at a meeting of experts in Minsk, the press service of the CIS Executive Committee told BelTA.
Representatives of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, the Secretariat of the CIS Defense Ministers Council, and the CIS Executive Committee took part in the meeting. The experts finished and polished the document taking into account the remarks and proposals that had been received. Apart from that, the experts backed the Russian proposal in favor of signing the document as an interstate agreement at a session of the CIS Defense Ministers Council.
The agreement has been drafted by the Russian Defense Ministry together with the Secretariat of the CIS Defense Ministers Council. The document stipulates main approaches to setting up, deploying, and shutting down a joint engineer unit for humanitarian demining. The document also determines the status of the military personnel during a humanitarian demining operation.
CIS member states are supposed to independently determine the degree of their participation in cooperation for humanitarian demining and the establishment of the joint unit. Each state will have to decide how many assets it will contribute to the joint engineer unit. Each state will be responsible for training the personnel and equipping them.
