In the wake of last month’s (December 2019) Normandy format summit (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, December 11, 12, 2019), and awaiting the same forum’s top-level meeting in April, Ukrainian officials are airing proposals to revise the Kremlin-imposed Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015. The accords, designed to legalize Russia’s control of the Donetsk-Luhansk territory and to disrupt Ukraine farther afield, remain unimplemented to date thanks to the previous Ukrainian government’s successful maneuvering and stalling. That work has made it possible for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration now to call for revising the Minsk accords.
Whereas the former president, Petro Poroshenko, and the Ukrainian Parliament had unilaterally introduced domestic legal barriers to the implementation of the Minsk accords, the Zelenskyy administration proposes to revise these documents by negotiation with Russia, Germany and France in the so-called Normandy format.