NEW YORK, January 11. /TASS/. The United States and its Western allies have lied to Russia about the implementation of the Minsk agreements on Ukrainian reconciliation, so their calls to Moscow to communicate as usual are unrealistic, Scott Ritter, a former United Nations Special Commission weapons inspector, told a conference at the Schiller Institute via a video linkup.

"When it comes to the West's approach towards Russia, where every lie is accepted at face value. Every distortion of truth is accepted at face value," the analyst said, adding that "the Russians are demonized" in the West.

"The West is incapable of putting Putin in a proper historical context, and <…> incapable of dealing with him responsibly when it comes to solving the problems that we are confronting in the world today," he continued.

"Only [former German chancellor] Angela Merkel can answer the question: is she a liar today? Or has she always been a liar? But the bottom line is she's a liar, a liar. Once she has committed herself as a liar, [so] she can never be trusted," Ritter went on. "The same thing with the French, and the same thing with the United States, the same thing with the collective West. So we are asking Russia to deal with liars, to put their national security interests on the line in the hopes that liars will no longer lie. It’s an unrealistic and irresponsible proposition from the Russian prospective."

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.

Francois Hollande, then French president who participated in coordinating the set of measures on implementing the Minsk Accords in 2015, later confirmed Merkel’s statements. 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.