The co-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament, Rebecca Harms, has said that a condition for the extension of the mandate of the European Parliament's mission of Pat Cox and Aleksander Kwasniewski should be the publicity of their work.

While announcing at a press conference in Strasbourg on Tuesday that the extension of the mission's work in Ukraine will be discussed at a meeting of the European Parliament's Conference of Presidents on Wednesday, Harms said: "I think that we need to set conditions [to extend] the mandate, and a report [on the mission's work] should be published. This is being discussed only behind closed doors, and there is no change in Ukraine."

While assessing the work of the mission as a whole, the Greens leader said that Cox and Kwasniewski "did everything they could to improve the situation." In this regard, she recalled promises made by the Ukrainian side: "We were told that the situation could improve after the [parliamentary] elections, but the time has passed. I get the impression that the mission has not achieved its goal, at least as we had hoped."

Harms also said that the situation with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko was deteriorating.

"News from Kyiv with respect to these two political prisoners, Tymoshenko and Lutsenko, are such that the situation is not improving, but getting worse in both cases," she said.

Cox and Kwasniewski are currently on a visit to Ukraine.