MOSCOW, December 31. /TASS/. Remarks by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and ex-French President Francois Hollande that the Minsk Agreements served to win time for Kiev to prepare for war are "documented betrayal," Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev said on Saturday.

"The admissions by Merkel and Hollande are proof of betrayal. The south-east of then Ukraine was betrayed by the West from the start despite the verbal fluff around it," the senator wrote on his Telegram channel. "The cost of this betrayal was thousands of human lives over the past eight years of civil war in Ukraine," he added.

The politician noted that Moscow ended up being the only co-author and guarantor of the Minsk Accords, stressing that now Russia is protecting the people of Donbass who "as it now turns out, have been betrayed by Berlin and Paris in Minsk".

On Friday, Hollande who participated in coordinating the set of measures on implementing the Minsk Accords in 2015 confirmed the statements made by ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel that these agreements were needed to give Kiev time to prepare for an armed conflict. According to the LPR’s former ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik, France was not going to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2202 upholding the implementation of the Minsk Accords even though the country’s permanent representative at the Security Council voted for it.

In an interview with the Zeit newspaper published on December 7, Merkel said that the Minsk Agreements were "an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine." According to the politician, "it was clear to everyone" that the conflict had stalled and the problem had not been resolved "yet this was precisely what gave Ukraine invaluable time." She expressed doubt that at that time NATO states would have been able to support Kiev to the extent that they do now. Russian President Vladimir Putin later said that her remarks were absolutely unexpected and disappointing.