Vladimir Soloviev
Negotiations on the settlement of the conflict in Donbass are now taking place in the genre of diplomatic fiction. Germany, Russia, France and Ukraine have been preparing a Normandy format summit for a month now, which, as Kommersant’s interlocutors close to the talks note, is unlikely to take place in the near future. The idle negotiating mechanism has shown that the Minsk agreements seem to be in force, but their implementation is not moving forward. In parallel, the parties are arguing about who Kiev is fighting with in the Donbass – with the “separatists of Donetsk and Lugansk” or with Moscow.
Political advisers to the leaders of Germany, Russia, France and Ukraine began to discuss holding the next summit in the “Normandy format” back in August – immediately after the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Moscow. From the Russian capital, Mrs. Merkel went to Kiev, where she said that work was underway to ensure that the leaders of the quartet gathered in Germany by the end of the year and discussed a settlement of the conflict in Donbass. Angela Merkel will soon leave the post of head of the German government and would like to hold the summit before her departure.
The previous meeting of the Normans took place in December 2019 in Paris. Its final document emphasized that the Minsk agreements remain the basis for the work of the “Normandy format”, and also listed the political and security steps that the conflicting parties should take. The document also indicated that the next summit could take place in four months, that is, in March 2020.
But neither in March nor later did the leaders of Germany, Russia, France and Ukraine meet. Attempts to arrange a meeting have failed. Moscow has firmly insisted and continues to insist that first it is necessary to fulfill all the prescriptions of the Paris summit – from the establishment of the ceasefire regime to the introduction of the “Steinmeier formula” into Ukrainian legislation (approved by the contact group in October 2019; determines the mechanism for enactment of the law on special the order of local self-government in certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions).
Although nothing of the year before last year’s agreements has yet been implemented, the negotiators have been trying for a month to agree on a draft joint statement following the proposed summit in Berlin. This is a common practice – documents for a meeting of this level are always prepared in advance. And, if the heads of state have no objections, they sign them, and if new ideas arise, in case of consensus, they are included already during the summit.
The problems, as several Russian sources close to the talks told Kommersant, began immediately. Representatives of Germany and France (Per Gebauer and Emmanuel Bonn represent Berlin and Paris in the Normandy Four at the level of political advisers) proposed a draft final document, which, ac-cording to Kommersant’s interlocutors, largely repe-ats the Parisian text of 20-19. “In essence, it was proposing to do what was not done,” one of them noted. The Russian negotiator, deputy head of the Kremlin administration Dmitry Kozak, according to another source of Kommersant, made very radical amendments to the document, deleting a fairly large part of the text from it. And he made his proposals on what should include the draft joint statement of the leaders of the four countries.
After that, says an interlocutor familiar with the negotiations, Berlin and Paris tightened their position. They presented a new draft document, refusing to record in it the intra-Ukrainian nature of the conflict in Donbass. Recall that from the very beginning of hostilities Moscow insists that this is a war between Kiev, on the one hand, and the unrecognized republics of Donbass, on the other. The Kremlin considers its main diplomatic achievement to be, firstly, fixing this thesis in a set of measures to implement the Minsk agreements, and secondly, the UN resolution adopted in February 2015, which endorses this set of measures. After the introduction of this draft, the negotiations in the “Normandy format”, which took place via video communication on September 8 and 17, were conducted mainly about what kind of conflict it was and who were the parties in it.
The intensity of the discussions is evidenced by several reports that appeared in the Ukrainian and Russian press at the end of last week and at the beginning of this week.
First, the Ukrainian media on September 17 circulated a message in which a source close to the negotiations said that the Russian side “stubbornly tried to absolve itself of responsibility for the conflict with Ukraine, again advocating that Donbass separatists be included in the final document of the summit of the Donbass separatists as a second side of the conflict.”
However, according to an anonymous source, these attempts failed: “The representatives of France, Germany and Ukraine were as open as possible to reaching agreements on a settlement and offered verified neutral formulations that would allow the Russian side to save face. But the Russian representative Dmitry Kozak turned out to be completely unable to negotiate.”
The same source indicates that Dmitry Kozak asked Germany, France and Ukraine to include in the results “Russia’s obligations to resolve the conflict in accordance with the Minsk agreements,” “as if these obligations were unknown to him.” But, the anonymous interlocutor notes, neither Germany, nor France, nor Ukraine “did not succumb to this provocation.” This week, a Ukrainian source was answered by a similarly anonymous, but no less close to the negotiations, source from the Russian side. According to him, all the participants in the negotiations, including representatives of Ukraine, initially agreed that the Minsk agreements are the only basis for resolving the conflict. But then the representatives of Berlin, Paris and Kiev refused to fix in the draft final document “the geographical location of the conflict, its nature and the parties to the conflict, which were entrusted with the obligations to resolve it by the Minsk agreements.”
“The French and the Germans have gone so far that they have deleted from the draft results the indication they themselves proposed that the conflict is taking place“ in Ukraine ”, which had not been disputed by anyone before. Moreover, they made this amendment their principled position, “- said a source in a conversation with the TASS news agency.
After that, an anonymous person close to them disclosed the contents of the negotiations held on September 17, Dmitry Kozak suggested that everyone should write down who, in their opinion, are the parties to the conflict. In response, representatives of Germany and France, “as well as the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Andriy Yermak, expressed a verbal position that the conflict is international and is taking place between Russia and Ukraine, making a reservation that this information should not leave a narrow“ circle ”of negotiators and should not be fixed in projects. documents “.
In the end, political advisers to the leaders of Germany and France suggested that the Russian side should write itself into the draft final document as an aggressor and write itself commitments to resolve the conflict, ”concluded a source from the Russian side.
Thus, the attempt to agree on the draft final document of the proposed September 17 summit failed. The date of the next negotiations on this matter has not yet been determined. The Russian side proposed to hold them on September 20, but the other participants in the format insisted not to rush.
Three interlocutors of Kommersant, who are engaged in the Ukrainian direction in various Russian state structures, believe: against this background, the likelihood that the summit in the “Normandy format” will be held in Germany before the end of the year is close to zero. “Why this meeting of Merkel is understandable: she participated in the preparation of the Minsk agreements and before leaving the leading post, she wants to put an end to it. Why Kiev needs the summit is also clear: it is an opportunity to raise the issue of Crimea at the talks and get PR. For us, it’s a waste of time if there is no result, ”explained one source. The second was more laconic, noting that with the existing position of Ukraine, Germany and France, refusing to register Kiev and Donbass as parties to the conflict, as it is written in the Minsk agreements, the summit will not take place. The third concluded: “It turns out that everyone pretends that they are preparing a summit.”
