Normandy Four meeting ends in stalemate on Donbas

Representatives from Ukraine, France, Germany and
Russia met in Berlin on Feb. 10 for talks on peacefully settling the conflict in
south-eastern Ukraine. No progress was made after nine hours of negotiations.
Furthermore, no date was set for the resumption of talks. Ukraine’s
representative, Andriy Yermak, said that the next meeting would be “soon”, and
Bloomberg reports that its sources said that the next meeting would be held in
March.

The main issue is the interpretation of the Minsk
Accords, signed in 2015, which call for the reintegration under the control of
Kyiv of the currently occupied territory of Ukraine. The Ukrainian and Russian
interpretations of the accord are mutually exclusive on several levels. “Yes,
there are differences, but there is a will to talk further,” Yermak noted.

Russian negotiator Dmitry Kozak stated that “We tried
to agree on the final statement of our negotiations…that the Normandy format
should overcome all differences regarding the interpretation of the Minsk
agreements at any cost…today it wasn’t possible to overcome these differences,”
tass.com reported on Feb. 11.

James Hydzik: The failure
at this point might be in the expectation that the negotiators come to an
agreement “at any cost”. The fact that Yermak, who fails to qualify as a
Ukrainian ultra-nationalist by most measures, cannot find enough common ground
to sign to an official statement with Kozak despite all parties being willing
to talk, is telling in itself. Either the two sides are actually diametrically
opposed and are expecting the other side to bear all of the “at any cost”, or
are playing for time, or, more likely both.