MOSCOW, May 24. /TASS/. Ukraine’s statements about the need to review the Minsk Agreements are prompted by the continuously slipping approval ratings of the authorities in power, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Argumenty i Facty newspaper.

"Indeed, there has been increasingly more and more talk about it in Kiev. [Ukrainian] President Vladimir Zelensky recently said, ‘the Minsk Agreements are only needed to keep up the sanctions against Russia rather than to achieve a settlement.’ Head of the Ukrainian delegation to the [Trilateral] Contact Group Leonid Kravchuk branded the Minsk [Agreements] as a ‘noose around Ukraine’s neck and an obstruction to settling the conflict.’ It is hard to view these statements as anything other than a refusal to implement the Package of Measures. The reason behind it is clear. The approval ratings of the Kiev authorities are going downhill quickly and steadily, and there is still no ‘peace in Donbass’ as promised by Zelensky," the minister said when asked a relevant question.

Lavrov confidently said that the authorities in Kiev consider the granting of a special status in the Ukrainian state to certain areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions - a key element of the Minsk Agreements - to be a "roadblock on the path to continuing the current policy." "The policy of unbridled nationalism, Russophobia, forceful Ukrainization, the suppression of independent media, persecution of dissidents and severing centuries-old ties between our nations," he underlined.

The top Russian diplomat also commented on "Kiev’s incessant pursuit of changing the sequence of implementing the provisions of the Package of Measures by putting acquiring control over the whole Russian-Ukrainian border first on the list with holding local elections in Donbass following after it." "What comes next is not even being hidden at all: the filtration of the population by interning all ‘disloyal’ people in concentration camps," the minister pointed out. "There can hardly be expectations that Donbass residents can be excited about such prospects. People are subjected to all horrors of bombings and relentless shelling by Kiev’s forces and they suffer from the economic blockade imposed [on them] by the Ukrainian authorities."

According to Lavrov, to find a way out of the current deadlock "Kiev authorities should decide on whether they want Donbass to be reintegrated into the Ukrainian state." "If they do, there is only one way to achieve that, and it is the clear and consistent implementation of the Package of Measures," the top diplomat concluded. "I remind you that this document is endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution and it is therefore binding to all the parties the conflict, that is Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk," the diplomat stressed.