As soon as the Ukrainian leadership runs out of invention other ways to evade fulfilling its obligations under the Minsk agreements, it returns to favorite thesis that “the Minsk process must be flexible”, DPR Plenipotentiary and Foreign Minister Natalia Nikonorova stated.
«The only problem is that the word “flexible” is always understood by the Ukrainian authorities as “rewritten, altered, changed”. But never «agreed on all the details and implemented.»
We draw attention of Mr. Zelensky to the fact that calls for meetings with leaders of third countries will in no way help him to resolve conflict in Donbass. Thus, statements about the fact that he “does not care about the place of negotiations, but about content” are simply absurd: the main content of the Minsk agreements is precisely the need for a direct dialogue with us, and the Ukrainian authorities are trying to evade it by all means.
And Zelensky’s concern that the pace of negotiation process is not fast enough sounds completely hypocritical — and such statements are made by the president of the country, whose representatives on the Minsk platform are doing everything possible to delay and complicate the work on the negotiation track as much as possible. However, if the Ukrainian leader really wants to speed up the negotiations, then we can advise him the way. For example, he can put pressure on representatives in the Contact Group so that they finally send their comments to our draft Roadmap, which was sent out 7 months ago and we haven’t received a reply so far.
We believe that it is high time for the Ukrainian authorities to come to terms with a simple fact: the only goal that Minsk process serves is to achieve peace in Donbass on the basis of agreement between the conflict parties — the Republics and Kiev — on further conditions of coexistence and neighborhood. And in order to achieve this obvious and transparent goal, Ukraine should not call for changes or use other formats of peace negotiations, but take and implement those agreements that were signed by the parties and approved by the UN Security Council 6 years ago,» Nikonorova stressed.
