KIEV, February 12. /TASS/. The Ukrainian authorities have done nothing to comply with the Minsk-2 accord since it was signed four years ago, but have cashed in handsomely on the war in Donbass, Yuri Boiko, the founder of the Opposition Platform-For Life Party, said on Tuesday.
"Today marks four years since the signing of the Minsk agreements that were also approved in a separate resolution by the UN Security Council. The authorities, who were among the signatories, are not seeking to comply with these accords because they are lining their pockets from the war," he elaborated.
Boiko is confident that the country won’t achieve peace under the present government. "Having gotten fat off the war, the government pursues a policy of escalating hatred instead of scaling back confrontation and tensions in society," he explained. "By employing a blockade of people and territories, military administrations and martial law, they are using any method to hold on to power," the legislator stressed.
According to him, the only way to unite the country and achieve peace is to "sit down at the negotiating table with all participants of the conflict and come to an agreement, and reach solutions acceptable to all parties. The overwhelming majority of the Ukrainians want peace. We will bring it back to the country through political resolutions. We have a clear program of what to do to achieve that," he concluded.
The Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine comprised of senior envoys from Russia, Ukraine and the European security watchdog, the OSCE, on February 12, 2015, signed a 13-point Package of Measures to fulfil the September 2014 Minsk agreements.
The Package of Measures, known as Minsk-2, envisaged a ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and the people’s militias of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Lugansk starting from February 15 and a subsequent pullback of heavy weapons from the line of engagement. The deal also laid out a roadmap for a lasting settlement in Ukraine, including an all-for-all prisoner swap, local elections and constitutional reforms to give more autonomy to the war-torn eastern regions.
The Kiev regime has refused to comply with the political provisions of the agreement, citing unsettled security issues as the reason. In light of that, in September 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested deploying a UN mission along the contact line in the Donbass region to ensure the safety of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission staff. Later on, the head of state did not rule out that such a mission could be deployed to the entire conflict zone, but with the consent of the self-proclaimed Donbass republics.
In contrast, Ukraine began talking about the need to deploy a full-fledged UN peacekeeping mission to the region, which would assume the functions of an interim administration with the subsequent delegation of power to Kiev.