Despite the communique signed by the Normandy Four, the president of Ukraine claims that the Minsk Agreements in their current form are not feasible and should be changed. DPR plenipotentiary to the Trilateral Contact Group’s talks in Minsk, Foreign Minister Natalya Nikonorova commented on his statement.
“Recent statements by representatives of Ukraine, including the president of this country, demonstrate as pointedly as can be the attitude of the Ukrainian leadership to the Minsk Agreements, the guarantor countries and the UN Security Council, which approved the Complex of Measures with its resolution.
Such rhetoric suggests either bipolar disorder or boundless hypocrisy of the Ukrainian leadership, who are trying to revise their commitments under the Complex of Measures and, at the same time, to create the illusion of supposedly reliable partners in the talks. The Ukrainian leader is making more attempts to convince us of his commitment to the Minsk Agreements in an openly questionable manner, he is changing the meaning of the Complex of Measures arbitrarily, hoping that no one will notice. A vivid example of that is his statement on the constitutional reform provided for by the Minsk accords, which he proposes to replace with a decentralization at the country level. In that connection, Zelensky admits that this is not provided for by the documents of the Minsk package, but “it seems to him that, in principle, this wording also fits”. However, this wording is completely untenable, since the “decentralization” provided for by Paragraph 11 of the Complex of Measures must be carried out “taking into account the specificities” of Donbass and “agreed upon with the representatives” of Donbass. In other words, the constitutional reform should enshrine the special status in the wording that should be agreed with us. The Complex of Measures does not apply to the rest of Ukraine, neither the constitutional reform it prescribes.
We draw the attention of the Ukrainian leadership to the fact that neither individual initiative nor substitution of notions is acceptable in the case of the Minsk Agreements. All that is required of Kiev is to implement each item of the Complex of Measures strictly, literally, in coordination with the representatives of the republics and in accordance with the very form and order as enshrined in the text of this international legal instrument. If the Ukrainian side continues to sabotage the Minsk Agreements and call for their change, it will mean nothing more than Kiev’s failure to meet its international commitments with all the ensuing liability to the international community represented by the guarantor countries, the OSCE and the UN,” the head of the foreign-policy establishment stated.