Kiev manages to add more and more elements to the protracted funeral of the Minsk agreements in order to deprive the process of all meaning.
The head of the Ukrainian delegation, Leonid Kravchuk, tirelessly promotes ideas that should strengthen Ukraine's position in the negotiations.
His latest invention is the renewal of the composition of the trilateral contact group and the creation of an additional platform for dialogue.
The Ukrainian politician shared his thoughts on how the new format should look like in an interview with the Ukraine 24 TV channel.
Similar proposals were sounded before, but they did not find any response either from Russia or from Donetsk and Lugansk, since, as usual, we are talking about reformatting the Minsk agreements and about the refusal of the Ukrainian side to fulfill their political points in the sequence in which they located.
This time Kravchuk decided that citizens who had previously lived or worked in Donbass should enter the TCG.
According to Kravchuk, people constantly come to him with this idea.
“They occupied very important positions there: organizational, political, economic.
They know them there, they know Donbass well.
We are thinking about how to create a council of people.
Not one to take a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the TCG, but to gather a council of people who will help to collect opinions and proposals, ”he said.
Why one more site is needed is not entirely clear.
The existing one is quite enough to realize that the current approaches of Kiev to the negotiation process completely exclude the possibility of at least some progress towards the establishment of peace.
Two days ago, the head of the office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak reiterated that elections in Donbass can only be held on Ukrainian terms.
A little earlier, Boris Gryzlov, Russia's plenipotentiary in the TCG, commented on this passage that is constantly repeated by various Ukrainian politicians.
According to Gryzlov, Kiev, declaring its desire to return Donbass on its own terms, terminates the implementation of the Minsk agreements.
“We record that the latest political decisions of Kiev are also aimed at continuing the aggression against Donbass.
The Verkhovna Rada's resolution on local elections, which violates the Minsk agreements, has not been corrected, ”he said.
The likelihood that the LDNR and Russia will agree to the expansion of Ukraine's representation in Minsk is zero.
And presumably Kravchuk is well aware of this.
In early August, he also came up with an initiative that had been repeatedly rejected in the past by representatives of the republics and Russia.
In his opinion, Washington should be involved in the negotiations: "I will say frankly ... until the United States is introduced into the format for establishing peace in Donbass, it will be very difficult."
The cemetery of stillborn ideas that has emerged as a result of all these initiatives is not at all a harmless thing.
It is used as an argument to convince intermediaries and guarantors that Moscow, Donetsk and Lugansk are not negotiable.
They say that Kiev is always trying to find common ground and each time it stumbles upon a refusal to accept its proposals and ideas, some of which - contrary to the Minsk agreements - were supported by France, Germany and the OSCE.
Everything goes on a knurled circle.
Thanks to the efforts of the Ukrainian delegation, the Minsk talks are at a final dead end.
And after the dismissal of Vitold Fokin, the only Ukrainian politician who advocated the implementation of the political clauses of the agreements, there was no reason to count on the parties to find mutually acceptable solutions.
And Kravchuk, driving another nail into the coffin lid, successfully, although without a flight of imagination, plays the role of a gravedigger.
There is no doubt that the plan he has now presented is far from the last.
With perseverance worthy of better application, the head of the Ukrainian delegation will continue the understandable and not very respectable game.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.