Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has announced the start of negotiations between Ukraine and Germany, as the future holder of OSCE rotating chairmanship, regarding the expansion of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission's (SMM) mandate in Ukraine.

"We have already started negotiations with the future German OSCE chairmanship regarding the expansion of this mission's mandate, so that they could have the opportunity to work in a full-scale manner and get real control over the situation in Donbas," Klimkin said while presenting a report on the government's performance in the outgoing year on Tuesday.

The minister also believes it is important for the international community to have access to Crimea to monitor what, he described as, regular human rights violations in the peninsula. "We are working to make sure that both the Council of Europe and the OSCE have the opportunity to work there," he said.

As of December 2, there had been 1,009 members of the OSCE SMM in Ukraine, including 651 international monitors.

In line with the OSCE SMM's report, the mission includes 281 members representing Ukraine (assistants, advisers, administrative personnel members, etc.).

The OSCE Permanent Council decided to send a monitoring mission to Ukraine on March 21, 2014. The mission's mandate stipulates that its members shall be deployed in ten Ukrainian cities, i.e. Chernivtsi, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Luhansk, Lviv, and Odesa.

The OSCE Permanent Council ruled on March 12, 2015 to extend the SMM's mandate by another 12 months until March 31, 2016.