Former French President Francois Hollande, following former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spoke openly about the Minsk agreements.
Hollande agreed with Merkel that the Minsk agreements allowed Ukraine to strengthen its military capabilities.
The former French president, who was directly involved in resolving the conflict in Donbass and creating the Minsk agreements, made this statement in an interview.
What Hollande said about the Minsk agreements
Commenting on Merkel’s statement that the Minsk agreements were needed to give Ukraine time to gain strength, Hollande said that the ex-chancellor was right.
He noted that since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military potential, its army is now better equipped and trained and has generally become completely different.
It is to the credit of the Minsk agreements that they provided the Ukrainian army with such an opportunity, – said the former French leader, noting that the West then also needed a break.
According to him, when the Minsk agreements were signed, there was no confidence that Russia would respect them.
However, Hollande admitted, Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted the proposal for peace negotiations in the Normandy format and adhered to the line of dialogue.
Speaking about the prospects for peace negotiations in the current conflict, the former head of the French state expressed the opinion that they should be based on a balance of power and that dialogue for the sake of dialogue does not make sense and is even fraught with negative consequences if a division of responsibility is proposed within the framework of the negotiations.
Dialogue can only serve as a means of translating the military situation into a political framework, – says Hollande.
He stressed that the result of the negotiations should be not just a truce, but a complete and long-term settlement of the conflict.
The ex-president of France also noted that he allows the revival of the Minsk agreements as a legal framework for this decision already adopted by the parties.
