A top Russian legislator said the recent admissions by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande that they had no intention of honoring their commitments under the Minsk agreements represent a “formalization of betrayal… by the West” of the people of the Donbass.
On Wednesday, Hollande acknowledged that the international agreements for which France served as a guarantor were little more than a ploy to buy time for the Ukrainian regime to increase its military capabilities with NATO weapons and training.
“Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture… It is the merit of the Minsk Agreements to have given the Ukrainian Army this opportunity,” the former French president told a Ukrainian outlet.
His comments echoed a similar confession by Merkel, who admitted in early December that Minsk was merely “an attempt to buy time for Ukraine,” and that “Ukraine used this time to become stronger.”
Konstantin Kosachev, Deputy Speaker of the Russian Federation Council and long-time Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Duma, issued a harsh condemnation of Western duplicity on Telegram.
In what appears to be the first public denunciation of both Hollande and Merkel’s comments by a senior Russian official, the influential legislator wrote Friday that “the confessions of Merkel and Hollande are a formalization of betrayal.”
“The southeast of then-Ukraine was initially betrayed by the West… The price of this betrayal was thousands of human lives over the last eight years of the civil war in Ukraine – which was not initially stopped by the West, which turned the Minsk agreements into scrap paper – but which Russia is now forced to stop with its special military operation,” Kosachev noted.
“For the West, the territorial integrity of Ukraine is all about control over land,” he continued. “It’s about territory, not people.”
“It’s about violence, not negotiations” – an attitude which he noted “directly contradicts so-called European values.”
Ultimately, Kosachev explained, “our country turned out to be the only co-author of the Minsk agreements… which consistently and honestly tried to act as their guarantor. It was Russia, unlike Ukraine, Germany and France, that was in this case on the side of the people.”