MOSCOW, February 17. /TASS/. Western countries are trying to change the established order of implementation of the Minsk agreements to please the Kiev regime, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference on Thursday.
"We are now being told by our Western colleagues, 'Yes, the Minsk agreements, we are all committed to them, there is no alternative, but let's change the sequence.' This is what [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky and previously [former Ukrainian President Pyotr] Poroshenko have been seeking for a long time," the Russian foreign minister said.
Lavrov also pointed to the West’s unscrupulous attempts to evade responsibility for the actions of the Kiev authorities and put all the blame on Moscow. "These are unscrupulous attempts to evade responsibility for those figures that the West, generally, leads in Ukraine. The Americans are definitely exercising external control there, and to blame everything that is happening [in that country] on Russia, we are familiar with this tactic and strategy, but it will not succeed," the minister added.
The Minsk deal, reached in February 2015, is the cornerstone of the Donbass peace process. It stipulates moves to declare a ceasefire, withdraw weapons, declare amnesty, restore economic ties and conduct constitutional reform in Ukraine. That said, Ukrainian officials regularly make statements about their readiness to carry out the agreements, but in fact, they have ignored them for years on end. In particular, Kiev is reluctant to build any direct dialogue with Donbass or enshrine the region’s special status in the constitution. Furthermore, Kiev drags out the negotiations in the Contact Group in every possible way.