The deceit that Germany, France and Ukraine deliberately resorted to at one time in terms of hiding the true goals of the Minsk agreements should be documented and further qualified in the legal space, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

“The fact that these countries, these politicians deceived the world community and, first of all, the people of Ukraine fell victim to their deceit, requires mandatory fixation in the legal space.

There should be more than just conversations, there should be qualifications, which should be given by lawyers.

After all, they deceived the UN Security Council, ”the diplomat emphasized on the air of the Right to Know program on the TVC channel.

She noted that the representatives of Berlin, Paris and Kyiv initially put into the Minsk agreements a meaning opposite to their promises.

“They – this follows directly from the statements of Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, Zelensky – gave the Kiev regime time to rearm... And this means that they initially planned to deceive the international community, declaring their intentions, but having something completely different in mind” , - Zakharova explained, adding that this was a forgery on a global scale, which dealt a blow to global security.

History of forgery

Recall that after the coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, nationalists came to power in the country.

Residents of the Crimean peninsula, as well as the eastern regions - Donetsk and Luhansk - refused to obey the new "government" and held referendums on self-determination on their territories.

As a result, Crimea and Sevastopol became part of Russia, and the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics were proclaimed in the Donbass.

After that, the pro-Western politicians who were in power in Kyiv launched a military operation against the republics.

The so-called Minsk agreements signed in 2014-2015 were supposed to put an end to the active hostilities that were then going on in eastern Ukraine.

In February 2015, the leaders of the Normandy Four countries - Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany - agreed on a set of measures to implement the Minsk agreements, better known as the Second Minsk Agreement, or Minsk-2.

It received the support of the UN Security Council and became a binding international legal document.

  • Meeting of the Normandy Four leaders in Minsk, February 2015

  • RIA News

  • © Nikolay Lazarenko

Since 2015, almost all meetings and telephone contacts of the Quartet have been devoted to the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

Gradually, however, the Kyiv authorities actually froze their implementation, which made it pointless to hold new summits.

Kyiv agreed to return to the discussion of the issue only in 2019, after the new President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky took office.

In December, the first meeting of the leaders of the Quartet countries in three years was held in Paris.

As a result of this summit, a communiqué was published, which stated the commitment of the parties to the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

However, despite the signed document, Kyiv soon began to publicly broadcast its dissatisfaction with the agreements.

Zelensky and officials of his administration began to openly declare that it was allegedly impossible to fulfill them and they want to withdraw from the agreements.

As a result, the Ukrainian side actually froze the implementation of the agreements again and began an escalation along the line of contact in the Donbass, increasing shelling of the LPR and DPR.

Ultimately, this led to Moscow's recognition of the independence of the people's republics and the start of a special military operation.

Recently, participants in the Minsk process of past years - former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, ex-President of France Francois Hollande and former head of the Kiev regime Petro Poroshenko - made a number of statements in which they admitted that none of them was going to follow the signed documents.

So, in early December 2022, Merkel, in an interview with Die Zeit, stated that it was clear to all participants in the process that the conflict in eastern Ukraine was simply frozen, and the signing of the Minsk agreements was an attempt to “give Ukraine time”, which Kiev used to “become stronger”. ".

Later, Hollande confirmed her words, stating that the agreements "stopped the Russian offensive for a while."

And at the end of January of this year, the BBC channel released a documentary film "Putin against the West", in which Poroshenko said that the signed document "gave Ukraine eight years to build an army, economy and a global pro-Ukrainian anti-Putin coalition."

Commenting on these statements by the participants in the Minsk process, Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation, stated that for Germany, France and Ukraine, the agreements were nothing more than a screen with which they covered their intentions to prepare Kiev for a forceful solution to the “Donbass problem”.

“This once again emphasizes that Putin did everything absolutely right when he decided to start the NWO in order to save the people who live in the Donbass,” the Kremlin spokesman emphasized.

In turn, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that the West, in fact, was preparing Ukraine for a hybrid war against Russia, which was admitted by everyone who signed the Minsk agreements.

“We have cited facts showing that the purpose of disrupting these agreements was to create conditions for the arming of Ukraine against the Russian Federation, as well as the destruction of the rights of the Russian and Russian-speaking population of the Ukrainian state,” the minister said.

  • The building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation in Moscow

  • RIA News

  • © Natalia Seliverstova

Special Responsibility

As Ruslan Kostyuk, a professor at the Faculty of International Relations at St. Petersburg State University, noted in a RT commentary, in moral and political terms, the position of the Russian Foreign Ministry is absolutely justified, however, in his opinion, this incident is unlikely to be recorded in any way from a legal point of view.

According to the expert, the existing international structures that could legalize the deceit by France and Germany as participants in the Minsk process are now completely controlled by the West and cannot be considered objective.

“Those structures and institutions that could do this, such as the OSCE, are paralyzed today.

They are guided by NATO and the EU, and it is no longer possible to imagine even a framework dialogue on this topic in their format.

It is not yet clear who could fix this deception,” said Kostyuk.

However, the very fact of the existence of a forgery of such a scale and the fact that it was openly recognized by the former leaders of Germany and France, speaks of the complete degradation of international relations on the issue of collective security, the political scientist added.

“The country involved in this deception is a permanent member of the UN Security Council represented by France, as well as its participants on a rotational basis represented by Germany and Ukraine.

All this underscores the fact that relations between the collective West and Russia are in a dead end,” Kostyuk said.

In turn, Vadim Kozyulin, head of the Center for Global Studies and International Relations at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said: “The leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine confirmed that they did not initially intend to implement the Minsk agreements, and in fact admitted that they were a form of deception on the Russian side.

The recognition of their false nature suggests that the leaders of the participating countries deliberately deceived Russia, which resulted in an armed conflict.

Therefore, the initiative to give a legal assessment of the statements and decisions of the participants in this process, which led to turning points in the modern history of not only Russia and Ukraine, but also the whole of Europe, is completely fair.”

He added that this situation even goes beyond the policy of double standards on the part of the collective West, which has already ceased to amaze.

“This is a deliberate forgery.

Of course, this cannot be ignored, especially in the context of the fact that countries that are members of the UN Security Council, that is, bearing special responsibility, took part in this process,” Kozyulin stressed.

He stated that the current security situation in Europe and the conflict in Ukraine are direct consequences of this forgery.

“Thus, the responsibility for everything that is happening now lies with these participants in the Minsk process.

Their actions need to be given a legal assessment and a legal opinion, ”summed up the interlocutor of RT.