PARIS, January 23. /TASS/. A meeting of the Normandy Four (Russia, France, Germany Ukraine) can be postponed to a later date unless Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his team start implementing agreements reached at the Paris summit, chairman of the political council of Ukraine’s Opposition Platform — For Life party and member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) Viktor Medvedchuk told TASS.
"If Ukrainian authorities represented by Mr. Zelensky will continue to implement agreements reached on December 9 [when the Paris summit was held] in such a way, then this meeting is unlikely to take place when it is supposed to," Medvedchuk said after a meeting with French parliamentarians in the French Senate on Thursday.
The politician noted that practically all decisions outlined in the final communique of the Paris summit failed to materialize on the Ukrainian side except for a prisoner swap. "Yes, people returned home, a large swap did take place, but there has been no movement further, unfortunately. Shelling failed to stop and the ‘Steinmeier formula’ did not translate into legislation," he clarified.
Medvedchuk added that Zelensky’s team is now suggesting redrafting five points of the Minsk Agreements while Russia opposes any changes to the previously signed documents. "Somebody is saying, ‘what disengagement of forces?’ And this somebody is the person occupying the office of the Ukrainian defense minister. ‘They should disarm!’ - a great idea, I also believe that everyone should disarm but to achieve that, provisions of the Minsk Agreements should be implemented that will lead to peace," Medvedchuk stressed.
"If this position is maintained by Zelensky’s team and the president himself, then we definitely won’t start moving forward and everything will remain as it is, just like it was under [former Ukrainian President Pyotr] Poroshenko," he concluded.
A Normandy Four summit was held in Paris on December 9, for the first time after a three-year break. Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Emmanuel Macron of Germany, Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine and German Chancellor Angela Merkel gathered in the Elysee Palace to discuss ways of settling the conflict in Donbass. The seven-hour talks yielded a final document committing to paper a number of concrete accords. Among the summit’s most expected results was an agreement to exchange prisoners-of-war in Donbass under the formula of ‘all identified for all identified’ by the year-end, to disengage forces at three more sections of the contact line by March 2020 and to enshrine the ‘Steinmeier formula’ into the Ukrainian legislation which provides a mechanism to grant a special status to Donbass. The leaders also agreed to continue high-level discussion in the Normandy Four format in four months, while making a number of steps toward a political settlement of the Donbass conflict.