The Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidential Executive Office, Dmitry Kozak, lamented this Friday that the negotiations held the day before in Berlin by the Normandy quartet (Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany), about the Ukrainian crisis culminated without success. .
The senior Kremlin official called the meeting symbolic, while claiming that “a negative result is also a result: the value of all the statements of various politicians and partners in the Normandy format and their commitment to the Agreements is now clear.” of Minsk”.
Kozak detailed in this sense that three of the four participants expressed positions of denial before the implementation of the Misnk agreements; and he alluded in this regard that “all these years they have been playing a game”, referring to the impossibility of ironing out the existing differences between the parties.
Regarding the positions of Kiev and the United States (USA), which is not among the members of the quartet, he added that they are trying to manipulate the remaining actors and issue instructions on how to stop and prolong the negotiations.
He added that the US State Department would have sent NATO member countries “instructions […] how to negotiate with Russia about the normalization of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine”; in addition to sending shipments of weapons to Ukrainian territory.
For his part, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, avoided that “the first people in world diplomacy have problems reading a very short and very clear text, such as the Set of Measures [para la Aplicación de los Acuerdos] from Minsk. Therein lies their misunderstanding of what is actually happening.”
Ukraine has been immersed since 2014 in an internal conflict after a violent change of government that resulted in an operation against militias in Donbas after the proclamation of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
This scenario led to the signing of the Minsk Agreements in September of the same year as the basis for reaching a political and peaceful solution to said conflict, which has not yet been achieved and has left nearly 13,000 dead as a result of the hostilities, according to United Nations estimates.
The Normandy Quartet; and the Trilateral Contact Group (Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) become consultation platforms whose purpose is precisely to find a solution to the conflict between the Ukrainian government and the militias.
