MOSCOW, September 6. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has stressed that Russia is not a party to the Minsk agreements and urged the US Embassy in Moscow to inform the US diplomatic mission in Kiev about that.
Zakharova was commenting on reports saying that the US Embassy in Ukraine had called on Russia to fully honor its commitments under the Minsk accords. "I did not know that the US Embassy in Ukraine also performed the functions of the American diplomatic mission in Russia. Is that how they are optimizing or what?" she wrote on her Telegram channel.
"As long as we do not know anything about that, I urge the US Embassy in Russia to tell the US Embassy in Ukraine that Russia is not a party to the Minsk agreements. At the same time, the Package of Measures is mandatory for the parties to the intra-Ukrainian conflict: Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk," she stressed.
Zakharova noted that the Minsk Package of Measures made no mention of any obligations by Russia, but specified the parties to the conflict, which are the Ukrainian authorities and Ukraine’s armed forces on the one hand and the representatives of certain districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions and their militias on the other, do have such obligations.
She recalled that Russia, Germany and France (that are the Normandy Four members, along with Ukraine) had pledged to urge the parties to fulfill their obligations. "Russia is doing its part of the work properly. It has been harder for France and Germany to do that recently, given that Kiev said directly and indirectly that the Minsk agreements were irrelevant. The sabotage of its direct commitments enshrined in the UN Security Council’s decision by the Kiev regime has shifted from a virtually tacit phase to a demonstratively practical one," the diplomat wrote.
"If the United States really wants the Minsk agreements to be implemented, it can influence Kiev and prompt it to implement all the clauses in the indicated sequence," Zakharova noted. "What is preventing Washington from doing that? After all, the Kiev regime follows America’s instructions on other issues (land and judicial reforms, arms purchases, and healthcare) zealously."