Minsk accords must be fulfilled this year, Ukraine leaders say

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asked his representative in the Trilateral Contact Group, former President Leonid Kuchma, to recall his statement that refers to the possibility to extending the Minsk negotiations to 2016. All sides have to fulfill their obligations this year because Ukraine has already paid a heavy price for failing to fulfill the Minsk accords, Poroshenko said. The Trilateral Contact Group to resolve the war in Donbas involves Kuchma, an OSCE representative, and the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

In his turn, Kuchma described the proposal creating the Donbas specific order as the Ukrainian government having to feed Donbas while the Kremlin rules that territory, the pravda.com.ua news site reported. The Russian government is trying to force Ukraine into a dead end with the talks, he said. The conflict won’t be resolved tomorrow, given that no frozen conflict in the post-Soviet sphere has been resolved. “I think Moscow has set the task, including in Donbas: no war, no peace,” Kuchma said. “But those are colossal losses, including economic ones for Russia. The economic situation will force Moscow to ponder how to exit from all this.”

None of the main points of the Minsk accords have been fulfilled, Kuchma said. “We firmly stand behind the positions that all points are fulfilled by the year end and that we gain control of Ukraine’s border in Donbas,” he said, as reported by pravda.com.ua. The border is a fundamental issue for us, he said. The former president also said that Poroshenko will never compromise to negotiating directly with the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic, as desired by the Russians.

The war in Donbas can develop along three scenarios, former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski told the YES conference on Sept. 12. The native scenario is for the Russian government to take all of Ukraine under its sphere of influence using military aggression, economic destabilization and investing in propaganda. The second scenario involves Russia softening its position and changing its policies owing to unpleasant conditions that Russian President Putin hadn’t anticipated. In this scenario, the West needs to offer realistic, long-term support for Ukraine to renew the economy. The third scenario is unpredictable. “Honestly, we don’t know what Putin will do,” Kwasniewski said. “His politics are utterly unpredictable.”

Zenon Zawada: We believe the Minsk accords won’t be fulfilled this year and the Donbas war will eventually re-escalate to some extent. And we expect the negotiations to drag into next year.

Kwasniewski left out a viable scenario of the Russian president either abdicating his presidency, or being forced to leave by business or government factions, to be replaced by someone who will engage in détente with the West. The West will welcome this turn of events, although it’s more hopeful for the “Putin softening” scenario. The West doesn’t want a collapse of the Russian Federation, but that is also a scenario, though among the less likely.