Kiev is still looking for any reason to evade the Minsk Agreements, Chief of the Donetsk Republic Public Movement’s Central Executive Committee Alexey Muratov stated.

“Last Friday, at the initiative of the Ukrainian side, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky, during which they discussed various aspects of the conflict settlement in the territory of Donbass. In connection with a series of unequivocal statements made by representatives of the Ukrainian leadership, Vladimir Putin asked a straight question whether Kiev really intended to implement the Minsk Agreements.

Official statements are silent on what the answer was, but the next day, in his speech at the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky made it clear that Ukraine would continue to look for ways to evade his commitments set out by the UN Security Council’s resolution and other international documents.

Suffice it to recall that the Minsk Agreements were reached in the context of heavy military defeats of Kiev, they were aimed primarily at the de-escalation of violence with the transition to diplomatic settlement of the conflict. The Minsk Agreements, in fact, validated the independence of the Donbass Republics de facto and built a sequence of the political layout of their special status.

But as soon as Ukraine licked its wounds, the scolding about the impracticability of the Minsk Agreements started again. So at the meeting of the Normandy Four in December last year, Zelensky reaffirmed Kiev’s obligations on their implementation, and the next day he started fawning on the Western handlers, local oligarchs and nationalists, thus backing away from his own signature.

Moreover, as an alternative, they are vaporing about joint patrols, the need to take advantage of the Croatian experience and forcibly reintegrate Donbass with the deportation and mopping up of the local population. At the same time, Zelensky claims that he is not going to engage in a dialogue with representatives of the republics. Accordingly, all this casuistry is nothing else but an attempt to simulate great activity to cover up his lack of political will and inability to address the issue of peace reestablishment in essence,” Muratov stressed.