The key reason of drawbacks in the eastern Ukrainian conflict settlement is the failure of France and Germany to convince Kiev to implement the Minsk Agreements, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th January, 2021) The key reason of drawbacks in the eastern Ukrainian conflict settlement is the failure of France and Germany to convince Kiev to implement the Minsk Agreements, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
"The main reason is, I am convinced, the inability or unwillingness of Berlin and Paris to make their subordinates in Kiev stop undermining the Minsk Agreements. The most important thing for me now is to understand what the French and Germans think," Lavrov said at a press conference.
According to the foreign minister, the Russian government and he personally repeatedly reached out to Paris and Berlin to raise the issue of Ukraine's unreasonable behaviors at peace talks, but they chose to "retract into the shadows" and refrain from public statements.
"If the default setting is not to offend the country or rather the government of Ukraine, with which hopes are linked for Russia's containment, then they should say this to us as it is. Then we will revise our actions in this direction," Lavrov said.
The Russian minister reiterated Moscow's long-standing stance that the conflict in eastern Ukraine had no solution but by implementing the Minsk Agreements. According to him, the very fact that Russia continues to engage in negotiations on the road map of the peace process is a "concession," as all previous agreements were violated by Ukraine.
One of such agreements was to exchange prisoners under the all-for-all formula. Lavrov said the Ukrainian government should "feel ashamed for delaying the exchange over reasons that have nothing to do with humanitarian considerations," whereas the breakaway eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk plan to transfer their Ukrainian prisoners to Kiev unilaterally "as a gesture of good will."
France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine form a negotiation platform known as the Normandy Four, which was established in 2015 to broker peace in Donbas. In February of that year, the group negotiated concrete principles of the peace process in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, hence the name of the agreement. The Normandy negotiators met several times since then, revising the details of the accords amid the non-implementation of most initial terms.
