What Are The Minsk Agreements

While the 2015 Ukrainian local elections were scheduled for October 25, the head of the DPR, Alexander Zakharchenko, issued a decree on July 2 ordering the denunciation of local elections in the DPR on October 18. [68] He stated that this action was “in accordance with the Minsk agreements.” [69] According to Zakharchenko, this decision meant that the DPR had “begun to independently implement the Minsk agreements.” [69] Zakharchenko said that the elections would take place “on the basis of the Ukrainian law on the temporary autonomous status of the individual districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” as long as they are not contrary to the Constitution and laws of the DPR. [69] These talks are based on the so-called Minsk agreements, which refer to a protocol and memorandum signed in September 2014 and a subsequent package of measures in February 2015, which was approved by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 2202 (and sometimes referred to as the Minsk II Agreement). All these documents were negotiated in the Belarusian capital (President Lukashenko cleverly offered to host these talks, which allowed him to adopt a neutral position), supported by the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and signed by representatives of Ukraine and Russia, but also by the self-proclaimed leaders of the separatist “republics” Donetsk and Luhansk. At the same time, most of the sanctions imposed by the EU since 2014 following Russia`s annexation of Crimea and its involvement in eastern Ukraine are linked to Russia`s “full implementation” of the Minsk agreements. As a sign of the reduced credibility of the agreements, one of the original authors is now backing down on his performance. Much of what eventually became the Minsk agreements stems from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko`s June 2014 peace plan, for which he campaigned and won elections at a time when peace was still popular and not yet seen as yet another tool for Moscow to destabilize Kiev. But now Poroshenko is publicly distancing himself from the agreements. In 2018, he appeased the nationalists by saying: “There is no Minsk. only Normandy. In early 2019, Poroshenko again publicly sided with the ultranationalists, agreeing that donbass should never receive special constitutional status, even though he had had the same status renewed in parliament for four years. As fighting raged in Debaltseve, emergency negotiations took place in Minsk, mediated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande.

They elaborated a “set of measures for the implementation of the Minsk agreements” (“Minsk-2”). This document, signed on 12 February 2015 by representatives of the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine, the DNR and the NRL, was the framework for subsequent attempts to end the war.51 The Protocol on the Results of the Trilateral Contact Group Consultations, commonly known as the Minsk Protocol, is an agreement to end the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine.