Ukraine demonstrates its absolute disrespect for the effort the leaders of Russia, France and Germany put into elaborating and agreeing on the wording of the communique — Natalya Nikonova

Ukraine, in its desperate desire to revise its commitments under the Minsk Agreements for its own ends, has reached the point when it distorts the wording of the communique, which is the result of the Normandy format meeting, DPR plenipotentiary to the Trilateral Contact Group’s talks in Minsk, Foreign Affairs Minister Natalya Nikonorova stated.

“This was not just a completely meaningless action, since the official version of the communique was published on the website of the Élysée Palace two days ago and released to the public all over the world by the media, but also a frank demonstration of the Ukrainian government’s absolute disrespect for the effort the leaders of Russia, France and Germany put into elaborating and agreeing on this text at the joint meeting in Paris.

After the Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic called on Kiev to immediately publish the official version on the website of the Ukrainian Presidential Office instead of the fake one, they did that, however, as is usually the case of Ukrainian officials, they did that inaccurately and not in full. We have had to issue an ultimatum to make Kiev change all the language versions of the text to correct ones.

The reliability of Ukraine’s representatives as counterparts in the talks, which had previously been very doubtful, has now become even more ridiculous, as it turns out they cannot refrain from tampering even with such a simple action as “copy-paste” rather than publishing reliable information on their state-run web resources.

We call on the Ukrainian leadership not to follow this blatantly dishonest path and stop trying to substitute the essence of the recommendations agreed upon in Paris. It took the leaders of the three states several hours to elaborate and agree on this very wording. The essence of the Normandy Four’s instructions, as the mechanism of control over the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, is that they must be implemented by both parties to the conflict and strictly in accordance with the wording that is spelled out in the communique,” Nikonorova stressed.