MOSCOW, February 11. /TASS/. Ukraine over the past seven years since the signing of the Minsk agreements has turned into an anti-Russian and largely authoritarian state where Donbass should not return by any means, the deputy director of the CIS Countries Institute, Vladimir Zharikhin, told TASS on Friday.
"Donbass cannot return to Ukraine that there exists today, because over the past seven years Ukraine has turned different and Donbass has turned different. The country’s current regime, with its major authoritarian features, prevents this return. The real opposition there is under pressure, just like all oppositional mass media. There are arrests, quite often extrajudicial arrests, of those who are opposed to Kiev’s policy," Zharikhin said. In a situation like this the representatives of the Donbass republics will be faced with "trumped-up charges, like those brought against Viktor Medvedchuk [the leader of the political council of the Opposition Platform-For Life party]."
Zharikhin believes that in the current situation the sole way of settling the situation somehow is to freeze it for the time being and let the Donbass republics restore their economies to normal.
"For this it is necessary to achieve the troop pullout and, possibly, to deploy peacekeepers along the disengagement line," he believes.
"If there can be progress towards a settlement, it can be achieved only by these means. Today’s Ukraine is unable to resolve the problem on the basis of the Minsk agreements," Zharikhin said.
The leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin, told a news briefing on Friday that the people of Donbass would like to see future Ukraine a member of one Union State together with Russia and Belarus. He stressed that this would depend on "how quickly it will be possible to eliminate the neo-Nazi consequences that have taken root in Ukraine".