BRATISLAVA, February 14. /TASS/. Slovakia dismisses the notion of a new Iron Curtain being formed in Europe and insists on solving the conflict in Ukraine diplomatically, Slovakia’s Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Juraj Blanar said in an interview with the TASR news agency’s network television channel.
"We have to look for all possible ways to achieve a ceasefire and peace in Ukraine," the minister stressed. Bratislava does not think that the only possible way to resolve the conflict is by military means. He added that Slovakia views Russia’s actions in Ukraine as "a breach of international law."
"Simultaneously, we reject the attitude that a new Iron Curtain will be put up here [in Europe]. <…> The European community and the world community must spare no effort to ensure that this conflict is quashed. To this end, there were some tools," Blanar said, citing the Minsk accords.
"The Minsk agreements were about to lead to a compromise, however, after Ms. Merkel’s statement, which was made when she was no longer [Germany’s] chancellor, we found out that the West was never going to abide by them, and this was designed as a tool to buy time so that Ukraine could arm itself against Russia," Blanar said.
In his opinion, such an attitude to the Minsk agreements was "a huge mistake."
The top Slovak diplomat believes that the implementation of the Minsk deal could have helped resolve the situation in Ukraine.
"They created an instrument of settlement in those regions [in eastern Ukraine] that are the subject of Russia’s interests, where Russia seeks to protect the Russian-speaking population that faced discrimination. <…> It was some kind of platform preventing war. War is the worst solution that can ever be [used]," he said.
"In the end, Russia demanded guarantees that NATO would not expand further incorporating Ukraine and that the OSCE-endorsed principle, which says that the security of one country cannot be built at the expense of another, would be respected. I think the international community was mistaken in this [approach to the situation in Ukraine], so this conflict [in Ukraine] was not prevented," Blanar said.
The Minsk agreements concluded by the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) with Kiev were geared to reintegrate the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions, which broke away from Ukraine after the state coup in 2014, back into the country. Russia, France, and Germany acted as the guarantors. Ukraine, being a party to the agreements and the subsequent Package of Measures on their implementation, repeatedly stated that it did not intend to implement them. After the special military operation was launched, France’s former President Francois Hollande and Germany’s former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had put their signatures on the agreements, acknowledged that these accords were meant to give Kiev time to get prepared for a large-scale conflict.