Uladzimir Matskevich: Are Minsk negotiations a screen? Yes, they certainly are!

Prolonged and complicated negotiations are still better than death of people in the armed conflict in Ukraine. However, the efficiency of meetings of the contact group in Minsk is very questionable.

According to the media, yet another session of the contact group on Ukraine is being prepared in Minsk. There were already three rounds of Minsk negotiations, which didn’t bring peace to Ukraine though. While meetings of the opposing sides are going on, the war takes its normal course: cities and villages are being bombarded, people are dying.

What sense does the so-called “truce” have? What processes do “Minsk negotiations” hide? Do they have any prospects at all?

Uladzimir Matskevich, the head of the Board of the International Consortium “EuroBelarus”, answered the questions of the “EuroBelarus” Information Service.

- Minsk consultations on Ukraine are continued, as well as the war in Donbas. Gunmen are bombarding Donetsk and other cities, even if less intensively; people are dying. The impression is that negotiations and the war run simultaneously, that they are hardly interrelated, and are organized not for reaching peace at all.

- This is indeed the impression we get. Unbiased sober analysts have been repeatedly saying that Minsk negotiation process and its agenda do not solve the problems of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

At the same time, both Kiev and Moscow needed certain truce: Russia intended to substitute unorganized volunteer groups with the regular army, which is, basically, going on now, though rumors say that some “members of people’s volunteer corps” and Cossacks still remain there.

Military readiness of the Ukrainian army leaves much to be desired. It is impossible to wage war with volunteer battalions that are hard to manage. Training of volunteers makes it possible to hold the occupied positions and lead a guerilla war against comparatively small groups of militants. Despite heroism and selflessness, the regular Ukrainian army is unable to oppose the regular Russian military.

Both parties to the conflict needed a truce; but neither the reasons nor the consequences of the conflict were eliminated. Due to the fact that Russia refuses to admit that it manages the military operations performed in Donbas, it has secured itself and claims that Kremlin doesn’t control “militants”.

The situation “neither war nor peace” wasn’t reached in Minsk. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė voiced the radical opinion, in accordance to which the US and the EU pressed on Poroshenko, forcing Kiev to make peace.

- There is a feeling that Minsk negotiations are a screen for hiding other processes unseen for the others. As even such technical question as exchange of prisoners of war goes not according to the Minsk plan.

- No consistent plan of how to organize exchange of prisoners of war was elaborated at the consultations in Minsk. The details are coordinated on-site. We can state that this agreement is somehow observed, but the process is agreed on directly in situ, on a lower level.

Are Minsk negotiations a screen? Yes, indeed! Poroshenko holds close contacts with Kremlin; both the EU and the US hold intensive consultations with Kiev and Moscow, and these consultations are kept secret. Such negotiations are a usual practice for a prolonged war, where the significant part of contacts is secret, too.

- Endless attacks of militants of Donetsk airport doesn’t fit even in military logic…

- I am unaware of decisions regarding the fate of Donetsk airport. The conditions of the truce presuppose the military parts to stay still at the already reached positions, which means that the military actions round the airport clearly and impudently violate the Minsk agreements.

But I can’t agree that military actions don’t fit into the military logic. They more than fit in the logic of hybrid war launched by Russia against Ukraine. First Crimea was occupied by “little green men” with no identification marks, and now Russian army is fighting in Donbas. Still, while Kremlin doesn’t admit its responsibility for itself and the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine, weak international community cannot oppose anything to such an impudent lie. This is the tactics that Russia added to its arsenal.

Russia is, basically, resolving all its foreign-policy problems and military problems using people, whom formally it cannot control. And the war is lead according to the common plan and with common command; but Russia doesn’t take responsibility for it.

Such actions are typical of terroristic groups that assassinate, but don’t take upon themselves responsibility for doing so, or even don’t set out concrete demands. Well, some of these groups don’t have concrete demands – they are destabilizing the situation in the country, in the region, and resolve their problems using the chaos. Russia adopted the tactics and policy of the terroristic groups. And this country used to be one of the leading countries in the world, which used to be a part of G8, top 20 leaders in the world, and is a founder and a member of the UN Security Council.

- Can it be that Minsk is becoming an arena for legitimization of “DPR” and “LPR”?

- Neither Ukraine's former President Leonid Kuchma nor Russia's Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov are capable of legitimizing pseudo-republics. I’m not at all sure that the current state of the international law and international relations can resolve this problem.

- What are the prospects of the Minsk negotiations at all?

- There is no alternative to peaceful negotiations. The resolution of the conflict by political means is better than any war. That is why even prolonged and complicated negotiations are still better than death of people, especially death of civilians, which is not taking part in this war.

For now the visible part of the negotiations is of low efficiency, but it is better than nothing.