The Normandy Four
leaders held their summit in Paris on Monday for the first time after a
three-year break.
MOSCOW, December 10.
/TASS/. The summit of the Normandy Four (Russia, France, Germany, Ukraine)
leaders in Paris on Monday showed some positive results while its participants
managed to reach progress in settling the intra-Ukrainian crisis, Member of the
Russian President’s Council for Inter-Ethnic Relations Bogdan Bezpalko told
TASS on Tuesday.
"A positive
result of the Normandy Four summit is that the presidents of Russia and Ukraine
held a bilateral meeting and that the summit confirmed the baseline agreement
to the Minsk accords, which obliges Kiev to fulfil many measures as part of
settling the conflict in Donbass," the expert pointed out.
"It can be said
that progress has been reached, although limited," he said.
The final document
confirms that Russia has managed "to achieve certain progress within the
framework of these preliminary terms [the exchange of prisoners-of-war under
the ‘all-for-all’ formula until the end of the year and the disengagement of
forces]," the political scientist said.
"These are all
technical details that do not violate the basis of the Minsk accords concluded
in 2015 and do not impose any additional commitments on Moscow," Bezpalko
said.
However, the expert
said he was somehow skeptical that "the Ukrainian side would fulfil the
Minsk accords as a whole."
Touching upon the
issue of Russian natural gas transit to Europe via Ukraine, which was not
discussed at the Normandy Four summit but was raised at a bilateral meeting
between President of Russia Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart
Vladimir Zelensky, the expert said that "apparently, the sides failed to
reach agreement on the gas transit."
Paris summit results
For the first time
after a three-year break, the Normandy Four leaders held their summit in Paris
on Monday. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian, Ukrainian and French
Presidents Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron met in the
Elysee Palace to discuss the issues of settling the intra-Ukrainian conflict in
Donbass.
The first personal
meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian leaders took place during the summit.
Before that, they communicated only over the phone. At a final press
conference, the French president noted this fact as one of the main positive
results of the summit.
During the
negotiations that lasted a total of over seven hours, the sides drafted a final
document, in which they stated some specific accords. The decision to swap
prisoners-of-war in Donbass under the formula of "all identified for all
identified" already by the New Year was one of the summit’s expected
results.
The summit’s participants
also undertook to ensure a complete and all-embracing ceasefire before the end
of 2019 and also agreed to support an accord within the framework of the
Contact Group on the political settlement in eastern Ukraine on three
additional sections of disengaging forces and weapons in the conflict area by
the end of March 2020.
The main result,
however, was, perhaps, an agreement to continue the discussion at the highest
level in the Normandy format already in four months and make steps within this
time towards the political settlement of the conflict in Donbass.
Source: ITAR-TASS
10-12-2019
