Chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko said that former French President Francois Hollande and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking of their commitment to the Minsk agreements, deceived the Russian Federation for eight years in order to prepare Ukraine for the conflict, instead of really forcing Kiev to the world.
Answering the question of the correspondent of the program “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin”, Matvienko noted that Berlin and Paris have always deceived Moscow, and stressed that the Russian side has repeatedly faced lies – “they say one thing, do another, mean the third”:
These confessions and Merkeli Hollandthat they fooled us for eight years, instead of forcing Ukraine to peace, to sit down at the negotiating table with its own people, they used this time to saturate Ukraine with weapons and prepare an armed attack on the territory of Donbass, Crimea.
According to the speaker of the Federation Council, it is precisely for this reason that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine turned out to be “inevitable”:
“If such a decision had not been made, the consequences for us would have been catastrophic.”
In Russia, they really believed that the leaders of the Normandy Format states were “serious politicians” who “understood the responsibility for the consequences.”
“They suspected that this was not sincere, and they understood that if they wanted peace negotiations, they would have forced Kyiv,” – summed up the head of the Federation Council.
In turn, the press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov called the Minsk agreements a game of thimbles:
“Yes, with the Minsk agreements, it was a game of thimbles with us, we were deceived.”
Peskov noted that such a circumstance “untied the hands” of the Kyiv authorities, which allowed them to organize a massacre of Russians in “their own country.” As a result, the special military operation in Ukraine was brought closer.
And the speaker of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Viacheslav Volodin states: Former President of France Francois Hollande with his admission that the Minsk agreements allowed Kyiv to build up military power, he decided to “turn himself in.”
“Today he actually made a confession. And he talked about what really happened. Of course, this will mitigate the punishment … “.
According to Volodin, despite the revelations of the ex-head of the French state, such “sincerity” does not relieve him of responsibility.
In this context, it is worth recalling last year’s statement by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova that in 2014, after a referendum in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, the proclaimed republics were not officially recognized, because Moscow tried to preserve the integrity of Ukraine and resolve the conflict through diplomatic means.
Speaking at the presentation of the informational brochure “25 Questions about Crimea”, Zakharova then emphasized:
“We are now talking about Crimea and Sevastopol, and about the referendum that took place there in 2014, and which we recognized. But in the same 2014 there was another referendum – in Donetsk and Luhansk. People have spoken clearly. They wanted to leave peacefully, just like the Crimeans.
What did the West say then? They began to threaten, shout, intimidate, blackmail. And then we in no way frightened and not going to back down, gave a chance, on the one hand, to preserve Ukraine, and on the other hand, to use political and diplomatic opportunities to resolve this situation.”
To this end, Russia, together with Donetsk and Luhansk, developed the first package of Minsk agreements, after which, together with the international community, Minsk-2 was created, which Kiev and the Western participants first signed and then refused to implement:
“We have been waiting for seven years, but we have been waiting actively, prompting. They did not just deceive Donetsk and Lugansk. They sacrificed to their own hypocrisy and helplessness thousands of people who have died over the years.
They brought up tens of thousands of their Western journalists who have learned not to see problems and turn away, thousands of social activists, humanitarians who have learned not to notice the killing of children, the destruction of civilian infrastructure. After all, they all signed the Minsk agreements, and they betrayed them.”
