Lavrov doubts next summit will occur in April, as planned

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Feb. 17
that he doubts that the next Normandy Format summit can be held in April owing
to Ukraine’s inability to fulfill its December agreements at the Paris summit.
“We are still not seeing progress in any direction. Kyiv is braking the
withdrawal of forces and hardware. We also don’t see movement towards Ukraine’s
obligations that it took upon itself in Paris. On including the Steinmeier
formula in Ukrainian legislation, on a decision on all the aspects of the
legal  status of Donbas on a permanent basis in Ukrainian legislation,” he
told journalists in Moscow, as reported by the Foreign Ministry’s website.

Progress is also lacking in demining efforts, Lavrov
said. Continuing the Poroshenko administration’s policy, Ukraine is still
refusing to engage in direct talks with the representatives of Donetsk and
Luhansk, he said. “So the statements of our colleagues on the Normandy Format
regarding April as the date of the summit is merely their desires and ideas
that they are expressing out loud, and nothing more,” he said.

Zenon Zawada: These
statements play directly into the longtime Russian strategy of feeding the
narrative in the public discourse that the war in Donbas is the entirely the
fault of the Ukrainian government, including in allowing it to erupt, in
extending the warfare and in not wanting to resolve it. But with the Zelensky
administration having made the mistake of giving the Russians the advantage, in
having indicated its eagerness to end the warfare (even proposing unrealistic deadlines),
the Russians are going to make the most of their upperhand to the full extent.

We are now seeing the Russians make the negotiations
as difficult as possible, extracting as many concessions as possible from the
Zelensky administration, making such humiliating proposals as negotiating
directly with the Donbas leaders and determining Ukraine’s cultural policies.
Battles are ongoing with weekly casualties, and the Russian-backed forces even
launched an offensive this morning. Such events further discredit Zelensky’s
genuine (although misguided) attempts as peace.

Nonetheless, we are confident the Russians want to
bring Zelensky back to the negotiating table in order to advance further
Ukraine’s capitulation, to lure Zelensky into more diplomatic traps in order to
discredit him further with the public, or both. So we are calling Lavrov’s
bluff with the expectation that the next Normandy Format summit will occur by
late spring-early summer, if not in April.