Yermak says he hasn’t abandoned Donbas council proposal

President’s Office Head Andriy Yermak said on May 4
that he has not abandoned the idea of creating advisory councils involving
representatives of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics,
but they will never be government officials. “Ukraine perceives the
representatives of civil society as the territories’ representatives, moreover
as citizens of Ukraine. I stress this since Russia is giving out its passports
in Donbas. Citizens of Ukraine who didn’t participate in military actions,
didn’t kill our soldiers, didn’t make criminal decisions, but were forced to
remain on the uncontrolled territories. We are ready to talk to these people,”
Yermak said in an online discussion organized by the Atlantic Council think
tank in Washington. At the same time, Yermak spoke of the advisory council in
the past tense during the online discussion, the pravda.com.ua news site noted.

In order to move the Donbas peace talks in Minsk from
their current dead end, Yermak proposed including cabinet ministers and members
of parliament in the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group in
Minsk. Diplomats with the Normandy Four (Russia, France and Germany) called for
the need for a “new impulse” to the Minsk talks to make them more effective, he
said during the online discussion. To that end, each subgroup of the Ukrainian
delegation will include at least one more cabinet official not lower than a
deputy minister, he said. The Ukrainian delegation will also include several
heads of relevant parliamentary committees, he said. “We hope that the Russians
will also undertake such an enhancement. And that mean the talks will become
more effective,” he said. Yermak also proposed making the Minsk talks “daily,
not weekly.”

Zenon Zawada: However Yermak may have envisioned the advisory councils, the proposal
has been firmly rejected, both among Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders and French
and German diplomats. As a result, the Donbas peace talks are at a dead end,
with no apparent maneuver or impulse that can move them forward. We believe
Yermak mentioned the proposal of including more officials in the talks because
he had no new ideas to suggest at the online discussion. We don’t see how more
people getting involved will make the talks more effective.