Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, has told Al Jazeera he believes the Minsk agreement is being blatantly violated by Russia and has called for a strengthening of the international monitoring mechanism in the Ukraine, which is being led by the OSCE.

Linkevicius, who was attending a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York, argued the key to ending the violence is increased scrutiny of the border between Ukraine and Russia.