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Kiev was preparing for military conflict with Russia since 2019, Ukrainian official says

"We have been preparing for a war, and preparing very massively. And the fact that as of today we have already weathered 180 days of the war and we are on our own territory, we haven’t yielded it, this indeed shows that we have been gearing up for the war," Alexey Danilov noted

KIEV, August 26. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council Secretary Alexey Danilov said that the country’s leadership had been gearing up for a military conflict with Russia since December 2019 when at the Normandy Four summit in Paris Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky turned down all options for compromise on the situation in Donbass.

"We have been preparing for a war, and preparing very massively. And the fact that as of today we have already weathered 180 days of the war and we are on our own territory, we haven’t yielded it, this indeed shows that we have been gearing up for the war. And our preparations for the war began after December 8-9, 2019. <...> When on December 8-9, 2019 in Paris, our country’s president Zelensky did not agree to those conditions offered to us by Russia, France, Germany, to put it mildly, he said: ‘No, friends, there will be no Minsk-3, we will stand up for our country,’ the following day we began to realize that a big war with the Russian Federation was imminent," he told the NTA TV channel.

An internal armed conflict with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics who declared their independence has been underway in Donbass since 2014. In order to settle it, the Minsk Accords were signed back in February 2015 with the direct participation of the Normandy Four leaders (Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine). The Normandy Four then convened five more times in order to get the process going. Their last summit was held in Paris in December 2019. Back then, the parties again mapped out the four-month plan of action, but it was not implemented either.

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