Thank you very much, Madame Chairperson. Like our EU colleagues, we, too, appreciated the update you gave us yesterday at the preparatory conference and appreciate the hard and difficult work of you and your colleagues in the ministry, as well as in the Secretariat and in the Russian government, who have been working hard to make the Assistance Group’s return to Chechnya a reality.

We welcome the news that the Secretariat and the Russian government are about to finalize an agreement on security arrangements,

It is our expectation that once these arrangements are finalized, the way should be open for the prompt return of a continuous OSCE Assistance Group presence on the ground in Chechnya, operating under its 1995 mandate. We welcome the Russian government’s apparent willingness to make this goal a reality.

We note Prime Minister Kasyanov’s decree instructing Russian government ministries to facilitate the Assistance Group’s return, and believe that this agreement should be finalized and the Assistance Group returned to Chechnya now so that we can hear reports from it before our ministers meet.

It is our understanding that the Council of Europe now operates on a continuous basis in Znamenskoye, and we can only assume that the security situation would therefore allow the Assistance Group to do the same.

Like our EU colleagues, we can recall other occasions on which we have been promised the imminent return of the OSCE, sometimes based on promises directly to your Minister and as early as April of this year, only to have those hopes dashed when each of these promises dissolved for one reason or another. It is our hope and expectation that the assurances we are receiving now will not lead to similar disappointments.

Thank you.