27.05.2021, Moscow.
The co-mediators of the signed agreements – France and Germany – must stop the attempts of Ukraine to shirk the implementation of the Minsk agreements by watching for any formal reason, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on May 27.
“I would nevertheless not confuse the subjects, unless, of course, the Ukrainian side wants to find some excuse to shirk finally from fulfilling its obligations. I hope that France and Germany, as co-mediators of the Minsk agreements, will not allow this to happen,” he said.
Lavrov noted that the statement of Ukraine’s permanent representative at the Trilateral Contact Group for settling the situation in Donbass Leonid Kravchuk about the impossibility of continuing the work of the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk after the incident with the Ryanair plane in Belarus could not be considered as a final change of the format, as Kravchuk had no right to make such decision.
The Russian Foreign Minister explained that the signed documents, which prescribed a certain format for the implementation of the Minsk agreements and which were approved in a UN Security Council resolution, could not be changed at the request of the Ukrainian representative.
He recalled that in 2016, the Ukrainian authorities had landed a Belavia plane in Kyiv without any explanation in order to get journalist and anti-Maidan activist Armen Martirosyan off the plane.
The head of the Russian Foreign Ministry also pointed out that at the time neither Kravchuk, nor any other politicians from Western countries objected to such Ukraine’s actions.
On May 27, former Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk said on the air of the Ukraine 24 TV channel that Minsk could no longer be a place for negotiations to resolve the situation in Donbass.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
