A light is shed on the frustrated, thanks to the startling revelations of some prominent former politicians. minsk agreements It was presented as a final attempt to resolve the Ukrainian conflict through diplomatic means.
The main reveal is undoubtedly the statement by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently said that these agreements negotiated in the Belarusian capital are just a ruse to buy time and allow Ukraine to arm itself.
I say surprising because until now everyone believed that the governments that negotiated them—two countries that clashed with France and Germany: Russia and Ukraine—had done so in good faith, and that wasn’t the case for Merkel. Except for the west.
The agreements provided a special status for the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and a new constitution that would take Ukraine’s decentralization as its main element.
In Russian-dominated areas, the language will have the right to self-determination and local self-government bodies to participate in the appointment of prosecutors and heads of local courts.
These agreements failed, first of all due to alleged pressure from London and Washington, who did not participate in their negotiations. The Kyiv government did not make any constitutional reforms, but did not grant autonomy and language rights to these regions.
Another important statement is the statement made by Matteo Renzi, the former head of the Italian Government, at an economic meeting in November 2014, which he attended with the French President Angela Merkel, François Hollande and the then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. For Ukraine, there was talk of a similar solution to the Alto Adige region of Italy, known in German as South Tyrol.
This territory, liberated from annexation by the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War, was the subject of an agreement negotiated between Italy and Austria in 1946, which gave it extensive autonomy: German and Italian become official languages and German education was allowed again.
Following new tensions between the two neighboring countries, and even terrorist-type activities by German-speaking separatist groups, a new statute for the region was adopted in 1972 mandating that any dispute be settled at the International Court of Justice.
According to Renzi’s account of the meeting of European leaders in the Thai capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin was willing to consider for Ukraine a solution similar to the one that settled the Italian-Austrian conflict, but he refused it without his Ukrainian counterpart. , Poroshenko.
The fact that Ukraine is preparing for a war with Russia is also shown by the disclosures in The Times newspaper that a British special unit openly from Norway was in the territory of this country a month before the start of the conflict, with marines.
The Moscow Government accused the British of taking military actions against Russia, and more specifically against the Black Sea fleet located in Sevastopol, that is, on the annexed peninsula of Crimea.
The author of these revelations, Robert Magowan, former commander of the British elite corps, referred to “ops of high political and military risk”, although he did not specify.