Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine in 2005, member of the Strategic Council of Resistance to Surrender Roman Bezsmertny said that the implementation of the clusters proposed by France and Germany for the implementation of the Minsk agreements is very dangerous for Ukraine.
“The clustering of the Minsk process is another trap for those who believe in the ability with today’s Russia to achieve at least reconciliation during the negotiation process. I am not even talking about achieving a positive result. This reconciliation is urgently needed for Russia today so that the wound they have created in Donbas is constantly bleeding,” Bezsmertny said at a press briefing entitled “Cluster plan’ for the implementation of the Minsk agreements – forced coercion to surrender” in Kyiv on April 20.
In turn, representative of Ukraine in the UN Human Rights Council in 2006-2010, member of the Strategic Council for Resistance to Surrender, Volodymyr Vasylenko, believes that “the implementation of clusters for the realization of the Minsk agreements is initially doomed to failure.”
“Numerous negotiations that took place on the basis of the Minsk agreements were fruitless precisely because they took place on their basis … The Minsk agreements really played the role of an uncontested end to aggression, but they were imposed by force, many provisions of these agreements contradict the generally recognized principles of international law and therefore, by definition, they cannot be a self-sufficient and the only instrument for resolving the conflict,” Vasylenko said.
He also added that “there is an alternative to the Minsk agreements – this is, first of all, the UN Charter, the norms of the law of international treaties, the norms of international legal responsibility and the norms of the institution of international legal sanctions.”
Bezsmertny is a former representative of Ukraine in the political subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group on the peaceful settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine.
