Interfax: Ukrainian bill on Donbas reintegration puts an end to Minsk Agreements – Kosachyov

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MOSCOW. Jan 18 (Interfax) – The Ukrainian bill on the reintegration of Donbas puts an end to the Minsk Agreements, and Germany and France should evaluate the act accordingly, Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee head Konstantin Kosachyov said on Thursday.

“By adopting the odious bill on Donbas reintegration, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada essentially put an end to the Minsk Agreements [the mention of which, by the way, was deliberately removed from the text of the law during the last reading],” Kosachyov said on Facebook.

“I believe Germany and France, as participants in the Minsk process, should give a proper evaluation to Ukraine’s anti-Minsk act, which dramatically changes the situation around an internal Ukrainian settlement,” Kosachyov said.

European and U.S. sanctions are linked to the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, “which were scrapped by the Ukrainian parliament today,” Kosachyov said.

“As expected, Kyiv has gone from sabotaging [the] Minsk [Agreements] to their funeral. By doing so, it, among other serious negative consequences, seriously let down its patrons in the West. Who now essentially have a very difficult choice between a war, to which further patronage of today’s Ukraine will inevitably lead, and peace, which requires honest evaluations and responsible behavior in the future,” Kosachyov said.

The adoption of the bill puts all international efforts in the Normandy and other formats aside for the sake of “declaring the territories opposing Kyiv as ‘occupied’ and Russia as ‘an aggressor country’,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it is much more important to today’s Kyiv regime than a ceasefire, conflict settlement, and the settlement of people’s life in Donbas. ‘Aggression’ and ‘occupation’ have now become the only source of legitimacy for the Ukrainian authorities and the main method of securing external support, and people will unfortunately continue dying for that,” he said.

The Minsk Agreements impose serious obligations on Kyiv, which has now decided to give up at the top level “the only possible way of settling the conflict with the LPR and the DPR – politically – and take everything to the area of the logic of victory over the enemy,” Kosachyov said.

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