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Campaign against Minsk peace accords continues in Ukraine

Many speakers say it's unacceptable to agree with terms imposed on Ukraine, and which only two months earlier were proudly referred to as "Poroshenko’s Plan" of settling the crisis in Donbas

KEIV, November 15. /TASS/. A campaign against the Minsk peace agreements has been developing in Ukraine. On television, many speakers say it's unacceptable to agree with terms imposed on Ukraine, and which only two months earlier were proudly referred to as "Poroshenko’s Plan" of settling the crisis in Donbas.

"The Verkhovna Rada (parliament) should express the public opinion: we do not need terms imposed by Germany or France in Minsk. We should quit Minsk, we need Budapest-2," former legislator Inna Bogoslovskaya said in People. Hard Talk programme on 112. Ukraine television channel.

On the same television channel, Nikolai Siryi of Ukraine’s Institute for State and Law expressed a similar opinion. Many experts say about a necessary "Budapest process" and talks of the Budapest Memorandum parties plus the US and the UK. Saying so, those experts claim Russia is "violating the Budapest Memorandum."

In early March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that the signing of the memorandum only signaled that Russia, the US and the UK were committed "not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and not to threaten to use them."

"This was done in exchange for Ukraine’s voluntary abandonment of the nuclear arsenals of the former Soviet Union. Russia took no other commitments and neither did the other countries that signed the memorandum," Lavrov said.

The Budapest memorandum did not oblige Russia to agree to the coup in Ukraine in February 2014 and to the actions of the Ukrainian radicals that undermined the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state, Lavrov said.

Several days earlier, Kiev’s international institute for sociology research conducted a survey about the situation in Donbass and ways to settle it. The results show 78% of the polled Ukrainians supported the peaceful settlement of the conflict.

Minsk accords

The Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine comprising senior representatives from Russia, Ukraine and the European security watchdog OSCE on February 12, 2015, signed a 13-point Package of Measures to fulfil the September 2014 Minsk agreements. The package was agreed with the leaders of the Normandy Four, namely Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine.

The Package of Measures, known as Minsk-2, envisaged a ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and people’s militias in the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk starting from February 15 and subsequent withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of engagement. The deal also laid out a roadmap for a lasting settlement in Ukraine, including local elections and constitutional reform to give more autonomy to the war-torn eastern regions.