You're reading: Kuchma says Normandy format’s expansion would be good, but unrealistic

The expansion of the 'Normandy format' of the negotiations on settling the crisis in Donbas would be desirable but unrealistic, says Kyiv's envoy in the Trilateral Contact Group and former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.

Speaking to Interfax-Ukraine on Friday, Kuchma said calls for expanding the Normandy format have been made when the situation in the eastern part of the country worsened.

‘Surely, the most desirable way would be if the leaders of all signatories to the Budapest Memorandum joined this format,’ Kuchma said.

Let them fulfill the obligations they undertook! I think President Petro Poroshenko would also like to see the United States president and the British prime minister in the negotiating process. As for me, I would also add the leader of China as a country that later joined the Budapest Memorandum and is a United Nations Security Council member,’ Kuchma said.

It would be hard to object to the idea of expanding the Normandy format this way, Kuchma said. ‘But we have to ask whether they want this, and whether Russia wants this, too,’ he said.

Kuchma warned against trying to change the format of the negotiations on the pretext that the Minsk agreements have been undermined. ‘Perhaps someone would like to change the formats, the contact groups or the negotiating teams more frequently in order to compromise the negotiating process. But Ukraine would surely not benefit from this,’ he said.