Russia is not complying with the Minsk agreements on Donbas but is in fact sabotaging them, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevhen Perebyinis said.
“Unfortunately, each provision of this document has been cynically sabotaged over the past two months,” Perebyinis said at a news conference on Nov.4.
“If you assess not words but concrete deeds, Russia has not made a single step that could be viewed as one made toward implementing the Minsk agreements,” he said.
“Active combat actions are continuing, Russia has not provided appropriate security guarantees to the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission and has also blocked the expansion of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission’s mandate to monitor the situation on the Ukrainian-Russian border,” Perebyinis said.
“The illegal armed groups have also not been withdrawn from the territory of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” he said.
Russia “has demonstratively ignored the international community’s opinion concerning the organization of pseudo-elections on part of Donbas’s territory on Nov. 2,” Perebyinis said. “By doing so, it showed that it is not seeking any de-escalation. The only thing Russia wants is to preserve chaos and lawlessness, […] deplete Ukraine economically, and prevent it from exercising its independent pro-European foreign policy,” he said.
“Moscow’s attempts to find any grounds for these so-called elections [in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics on Nov. 2] are futile. Nobody in the world has any doubts that their organization has blatantly violated the Minsk protocol of Sept. 5,” Perebyinis said.
Ukraine and Russia did not have any agreements on holding elections in Donbas, and therefore the international community should step up sanctions against Moscow, he said.
“We state with all responsibility that no other or secret agreements existed between Ukraine and Russia on holding elections before Nov. 3,” Perebyinis said.
The Minsk agreements envisioned the organization of early local elections in Donbas based on respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and within the Ukrainian legal framework rather than “illegal presidential and parliamentary elections aimed at institutionalizing illegitimate entities whose main distinction is absolutely unfounded terrorism and separatism,” he said.
“Therefore, in fact there were no elections in Donbas on Nov. 2 but there was an attempt to legalize the terrorist groups acting in this region,” Perebyinis said.
“These elections lacked even the minimum level of democracy and transparency,” Perebyinis said. “These elections will never be recognized by any civilized country in the world or any influential organization. The UN, the EU, the U.S. and other countries have already deplored them. And we are of the view that stronger sanction pressure on Russia, which has actually organized and coordinated this process, would be the right answer to this farce,” he said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that Moscow intended to recognize the results of the Nov. 2 elections in the DPR and LPR.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on November 2 that the elections in the DPR and LPR would be lawful and would comply with the Minsk agreements.
