MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Ukraine's failure to honor the Minsk agreements is the most significant when compared with other parties who refuse to comply with its terms, a lawmaker from French party The Republicans, Thierry Mariani, said on Thursday.
"We have to state that now the Minsk agreements are not respected mostly by the Ukrainian side," the French parliamentarian said at a meeting with Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament's lower house.
Kiev launched a military operation against the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) in 2014, when the two regions refused to recognize the new Ukrainian government that came to power in what they perceive to be a coup. At least 9,940 people, of which 2,000 were civilians, have died as a result of the conflict between April 2014 and March 2017, while over 23,400 people have been injured.
The sides to the conflict continue to exchange fire, despite the truce deal reached in Minsk in February 2015 and brokered by the so-called Normandy Format comprising Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine.
