MOSCOW, December 13. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s statement urging changes to the Minsk peace deal is unacceptable, Head of the Russian Center for Current Politics Alexei Chesnakov said on Friday.
"The statements by Zelensky and other representatives of Ukrainian authorities calling for changing the Minsk agreements should be treated without making any allowances for circumstances. Their content is unacceptable and their form is another convincing proof that Kiev is responsible for failing to fulfill the Minsk-2 deal for nearly five years since February 2015," Chesnakov wrote in his Telegram channel.
According to the expert, changing the agreements upon Kiev’s initiative is impossible without confirming that Ukraine bears political and legal responsibility for disrupting the peaceful settlement process.
"The price of this decision is well-known. Both Ukraine and the Europeans will pay the price because in this case the European Union will be forced to compensate for what Russia has lost or received less than due over the past four years of sanctions through the Minsk-2 non-implementation plus 'a bonus' that the EU will lose its face. We cannot insist that one of the parties to the negotiations is responsible if the other party refrains in public from complying with the deal," the expert stressed.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky declared his desire on Thursday to change the Minsk peace agreements, describing the procedure as very complicated but necessary.
In February 2015, participants of the Contact Group for settling the crisis in Donbass signed the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, known as Minsk-2, which had been earlier backed by the Normandy Four (Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine) leaders. The document envisages not only ceasefire, the withdrawal of hardware, amnesty and the restoration of economic ties, but also a constitutional reform in Ukraine aimed at ensuring the decentralization of powers while taking into account a special status for Donbass. However, this plan has not been fulfilled due to Kiev’s stance.