Western countries were providing Kiev with weapons and building their military bases in the country in violation of the Minsk Agreements long before the current crisis, Ukrainian opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk told Sputnik.
“The Western leaders who signed and declared the need to implement the Minsk agreements were in fact pouring weapons into Ukraine and establishing military bases there,” Medvedchuk said on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the 2014 coup in Ukraine.
In 2021, there were three foreign military bases in Ukraine – in the cities of Ochakov and Berdyansk as well as in the Lvov Region, the Ukrainian politician added.
“Who built fortified areas in Ukraine? Who provided it with military instructors? Who supplied it with advanced military technologies? Who trained the personnel of the Ukrainian armed forces? It was all the collective West, which, on the one hand, did this without advertising it, and on the other hand, said that the Minsk agreements must be implemented,” Medvedchuk said.
The politician recalled that both France and Germany had signed the Minsk Agreements and the United States had recognized the accords.
“It was an abominable and cynical act when during the 2019 summit in Paris, as France’s newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin and [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky met, a declaration was signed once again, reaffirming the Minsk Agreements and making them subject to full implementation and realization,” Medvedchuk said.
He further pointed to the statements of multiple Western leaders admitting after the start of the current Ukraine crisis to having used the Minsk Agreements as a stalling tactic to buy time to arm and train the Ukrainian military.
“Nobody was planning on implementing them. They [the Western leaders] were vigorously preparing Ukraine for this confrontation, making it a battleground for a showdown between Russia and NATO. And they have reached their goal. As Russian President Putin rightfully said, the war was started by Ukraine in 2014. The special military operation was launched to end this war,” the politician said.
In November 2013, a series of protests broke out in Ukraine due to the government’s decision to halt a policy aimed at integration with the European Union. The unrest quickly took on a sharply anti-presidential and anti-government nature, with the country’s opposition calling for a nationwide revolution. More than 100 people died in clashes between Ukrainian security forces and demonstrators.
The protests eventually turned into a coup, leading to the ouster of then-President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. It also resulted in the estrangement of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and the subsequent offensive against it by new authorities in Kiev.
The Minsk Agreements were a complex series of measures negotiated by Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine — a quartet known as Normandy format — in 2014-2015 in a bid to put an end to the armed conflict between the Kiev authorities and the breakaway eastern region of Donbas. Moscow repeatedly stated that Kiev was not fulfilling the deal, including by not granting autonomy to the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbas.
