Peskov: at the initial stage, Russia was optimistic about the Minsk agreements

At the stage of preparation of the Minsk agreements, Moscow was not pessimistic, there was a goal to implement these agreements, spokesman for the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“No, of course, the goal was to implement these agreements and reach a settlement,” he answered the question if the Kremlin would not have been pessimistic at the stage of preparation for the Minsk agreements.

This is how Peskov commented on the statement of former presidential aide Vladislav Surkov that, when developing the Minsk agreements, he initially did not count for their implementation.

Peskov noted that a certain pessimism appeared already at the final stage, when Kyiv, Berlin and Paris “are trying to bring down the sequence of obligations.”

“After Kiev, Berlin, and Paris, the direct participants in this process, openly stated that this was a camouflage for Kyiv’s preparation for a forceful solution to the problem. Nobody was going to do it, everything was clear,” he added.

When asked by journalists whether Surkov’s statement meant that there were disagreements in the Kremlin on this issue, Peskov advised turning to the ex-adviser to the president himself.

Surkov’s published interview with Alexei Chesnakov, director of the Center for Current Politics, consists of four questions, to which the former presidential aide answers either “yes” or “no.” When asked whether, when working on the Minsk agreements, Surkov proceeded from the fact that they must be implemented, he answered in the negative.

The Trilateral Contact Group (authorized by Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE) in September 2014 signed the first Minsk agreements, which ended the active part of the hostilities in the south-east of Ukraine. The second Minsk agreements stopped the escalation of the conflict in February 2015 in the Debaltseve region and were signed with the participation of Germany and France.

On December 7, 2022, former German Chancellor Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit that “everyone understood” that the Minsk agreements only froze the conflict in eastern Ukraine, but did not solve it. According to her, the 2014 agreements gave Kyiv “priceless time.” At the end of December, Merkel’s words confirmed and former French President Francois Hollande, who took part in the signing of the accords.