DISINFO: The West is guilty of disrupting Russia-Ukraine peace deals
SUMMARY
No one except Russia has been insisting so actively on agreements to end the bloodshed in Ukraine since 2014. Western leaders have been methodically disrupting these agreements, that is talks in Geneva, Normandy Minsk, Istanbul and other places. Those involved should be held responsible. Some of these politicians are still in power, for example Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. They cheated Russia 10 years ago. They provided guarantees and walked away.
RESPONSE
Recurring disinformation narrative from pro-Kremlin outlets accusing Ukraine’s EU partners of undermining the Minsk Agreements and other efforts to achieve peace between Kyiv and Moscow. This claim was made in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
France and Germany, among other EU nations, played a significant role in the preparation of the Minsk Agreements, in collaboration with Ukraine and Russia. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also had a crucial part in this process. Among other provisions, these agreements called for a complete ceasefire and the holding of elections in the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, in accordance with Ukrainian law. Ukraine was committed to implementing the Minsk Agreements; however, the implementation was continually disrupted by Moscow-backed military formations. These groups persistently attacked Ukrainian positions, and Russian troops refused to withdraw from the occupied Ukrainian territories.
Meetings in the Normandy format also failed due to Russia’s persistent attempts to undermine the agreements. In 2019, Putin himself stated that withdrawing Russian forces from the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine could lead to another incident like Srebrenica, referring to the massacre where Serbian troops killed around 7,000 civilian Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. (In 2015, Russia vetoed a US Security Council resolution that would have recognised the Srebrenica massacre as genocide.) Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections in the presence of foreign troops, which means Putin's refusal to withdraw Russian forces effectively disrupted the Minsk Agreements, implicating both Russia and the Moscow-backed separatists in the failure to implement the peace process.
As for Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022, where some progress was achieved, Ukraine stopped them after Russia’s atrocities in Bucha and other towns outside Kyiv were discovered. Read the full debunk at Myth Detector of pro-Kremlin disinformation about former British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson’s alleged involvement in disrupting the negotiations.
Read similar disinformation cases claiming that Boris Johnson derailed 2022 Istanbul peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, that Ukraine, Germany and France did not want to fulfil the Minsk agreements, and that West did not want peace, it prodded Ukraine into war.