Preparations underway for next Normandy Four meeting, Merkel says

Advisers to the Normandy Four leaders will meet on
July 12 to prepare for the next meeting to resolve the warfare in Donbas,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told June 18 joint press conference with
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin. She said she is ready to
support all efforts to resolve the situation in Donbas in the Normandy Four
format, which will involve Zelensky, Merkel, Russian President Putin and French
President Emmanuel Macron, the eurointegration.com.ua news site reported.
Macron confirmed his readiness to participate when meeting with Zelensky a day
earlier, the news site said. From his end, Zelensky reiterated at the press
conference that ending the warfare in Donbas is his main priority.

Zenon Zawada: In his first
moves to address the warfare in Donbas, Zelensky has toed the exact same line
as his predecessor, former President Poroshenko. Most notably, he has called
upon fulfilling the Minsk Accords and renewing the same mechanisms for doing
so, namely the Normandy Four format and the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk.
He even reappointed former President Leonid Kuchma to lead the Minsk talks and
has so far avoided pursuing his election campaign proposal of including U.S.
and British diplomats in the peace talks with Russia. The only different
approach we see is his newly appointed commander, Gen. Ruslan Khomchak, stating
that Ukrainian military ships will no longer cross
the Kerch Strait as they had in the past.

All this is a deliberate strategy by the Zelensky
administration not to destabilize the situation and to demonstrate to the
Western leaders that Ukraine’s neophyte president is truly a legitimate,
competent politician. However once the honeymoon period is over, it will become
apparent that Russia will want serious concessions from Zelensky for peace in
Donbas and will intensify pressure on him to deliver. This pressure will likely
come in the form of halted natural gas supplies by the winter, as well as
political attacks from pro-Russian politicians to be elected to Ukraine’s
parliament. And in a year or so, we expect Zelensky will have to make a
difficult decision on whether to continue resisting Russian pressure, or to
make serious concessions.