Hollande and Merkel’s confessions are ‘the officialization of treason’ – Russia’s top senator — RT Russia and the former Soviet Union

Thousands of people have lost their lives in eastern Ukraine since 2014 because the West treated the Minsk agreements like scrap paper, the deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament said on Saturday.

Senator Konstantin Kosachev was reacting to an admission by former French President Francois Hollande that the Minsk Accords were in fact a ploy to buy time for the kyiv government to build up its military. This decision must be credited for Ukraine “Successful resilience” to Russia in the ongoing conflict with its neighbour, he added.

Holland echoed a statement by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called the Minsk agreements in December “an attempt to give Ukraine time” to strengthen its armed forces.

The Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements were signed in 2014 and 2015 after mediation by Germany, France and Russia. They were designed to end the fighting between Kyiv and the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk by giving them a special status within the Ukrainian state. Kyiv’s failure to implement these agreements has been cited as one of the reasons why Moscow launched its military operation on February 24.

“For the West, the territorial integrity of Ukraine is a matter of controlling the land and not of seeking social consensus. It’s a matter of territory, not people. This is about violence, not negotiations,” Kosachev wrote on Telegram.

This approach « directly contradicts the so-called European values », he said. The senator noted that Western attitudes towards the territorial integrity of the UK and Spain have been completely different in the face of pressure from Scotland and Catalonia for independence.

“The confessions of Merkel and Hollande are a formalization of betrayal… The price of this betrayal is the thousands of human lives lost during the last eight years of civil war in Ukraine. The Civil War the West Didn’t Stop by Treating the Minsk Accords Like Scrap Paper,” Kosachev wrote.

According to UN estimates, more than 14,000 people were killed in the Donbass between 2014 and early 2022.

The only co-author of the Minsk Accords that genuinely attempted to act as a guarantor was Russia, the senator claimed. Moscow sided with the people and left the territorial question aside as long as « it was still possible to implement the Minsk agreement », he added.

The People’s Republic of Donetsk and Lugnask, as well as the regions of Zaporozhye and Kherson, joined the Russian state in the fall after holding referendums. kyiv and its Western supporters called the votes a « fake » and refused to acknowledge the results.