Donetsk, Dec 17 - DAN. Ukrainian authorities will be unable to unilaterally revise the agreements on settling the Donbass conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during his online press conference on Thursday.
“Kiev officials already make public statements that they do not intend to fulfil the Minsk Agreements,” Putin said. “There's the issue of revision of their basic provisions, but I want to draw attention to the fact that the Minsk Agreements were endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution and have the force of international law. So they won’t succeed in revising anything unilaterally,” he said.
The Russian leader noted that the meeting of the “Normandy Four” (Russia, Germany, France, Ukraine) leaders in Paris in December 2019 had a positive impact on the situation in the region easing the tensions. Back then, the parties to the conflict were able to carry out a prisoner exchange. “But nothing has been unblocked from the point of view of the economy and the social sector; nothing has essentially been done in terms of political settlement,” the Russian president said.
The Agreements dated September 5 and 19, 2014 and February 12, 2015 forged by the Contact Group in Minsk make groundwork for a peaceful settlement of the Donbass conflict. The Contact Group set forth a peace plan and agreed a ceasefire, then adopted the Memorandum on ceasefire implementation and later on the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements.
Article 11 of the Package of Measures envisions constitutional reform in Ukraine providing for decentralization (including a reference to the specificities of certain areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, agreed with the representatives of these areas).*jk