Oleksiy Arestovich, adviser on information policy to the Ukrainian delegation in the trilateral contact group, said that Moscow refuses to leave Donbass along the “golden bridge” that Kiev offered it.
“The set of agreements and the proposals that we offer, they provide a golden bridge for Russia to leave … This is a brilliant way out for them. But they don’t go for it, ”the Ukrainian figure noted in an interview with a Russian news agency Politeka .
In 2015, after the catastrophic defeat of the Ukrainian army in the battles for the Debaltsevsky ledge, the leadership of Ukraine and the unrecognized Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, with the mediation of Russia, France, and Germany, signed the so-called Minsk Agreements – a phased plan to normalize the situation. However, Ukraine has not fulfilled any of the key points of this document.
In November 2020, the former president of Ukraine, and currently the representative of Kiev in the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) on the settlement of the conflict in Donbass, Leonid Kravchuk, called the 2015 Minsk Agreements “a political loop around Ukraine’s neck. ” And a month earlier, the representative of Russia in the KTG Boris Gryzlov said that Ukraine is actually sabotaging the fulfillment of its obligations. “The Ukrainian side even refused to consider this plan, offering to work on the modernization of the Minsk agreements, which is tantamount to refusing to implement them,” he stressed in a conversation with journalists.
