MOSCOW, February 12. /TASS/. The Minsk agreements were not doomed to failure and could have ended the conflict in Ukraine as early as 2015, Russian Security Council First Deputy Secretary Rashid Nurgaliyev told aif.ru.
According to him, the agreements could have been implemented if all sides, including Russia, had made the necessary efforts. "Russia sincerely tried to settle the conflict in Ukraine peacefully," the security official said, calling the signing of the agreements "absolutely justified." "They could have been implemented if all the parties had wanted to do so. If the agreements reached had been implemented in 2015, the civil war on the territory of Ukraine would have ended in that same year," he added.
Nurgaliyev recalled that "Kiev's further relations with Donbass should have been built" on the basis of the set of measures approved by the UN Security Council. "And the fact that Kiev and some Western countries began to use the Minsk agreements as a lever to put geopolitical pressure on Russia is not Moscow's fault," he pointed out.
According to the security official, the agreements provided for a ceasefire and an amnesty for the participants in the conflict, as well as the holding of local elections and making amendments to the Ukrainian constitution. "Of all the provisions, only the exchange of prisoners has been partially implemented," Nurgaliyev emphasized.
He noted that Kiev undermined the agreements, including by passing laws that contradicted them. Ukraine was trying "first to restore control over its state border, but, in fact, to extend its authority over the territory of Donbass." Nurgaliyev also drew attention to Ukrainian actions in which "Russia was explicitly called the aggressor, on which all the responsibility for the damage suffered by Kiev was placed."
"Throughout the years of the Minsk agreements, the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] and Lugansk People’s Republic [LPR] was continuously subjected to artillery shelling; the casualties numbered in the thousands," the security official pointed out, recalling that during this period the population of Donbass "faced the direct threat of physical extermination."
Unfulfilled agreements
The Minsk agreements between the DPR and LPR, on the one hand, and Kiev, on the other, were intended to reintegrate the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which had seceded from Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, into Ukraine. Russia, France and Germany were the guarantors of the Minsk agreements.
Ukraine, as a party to the agreements that subsequently adopted measures for implementing them, has repeatedly stated that it does not intend to fulfill them. Already after the beginning of Russia’s special military operation, former French President Francois Hollande and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who signed the agreements as guarantors, said that they had supported the agreements only in order to give Kiev time to prepare for conducting a full-scale armed conflict.