(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that a deal on Ukraine would likely be inescapable in the long term, while denouncing what he considered a betrayal of the 2015 Minsk agreements on the part of France and Germany.
At a press conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Vladimir Putin said Germany and France – which brokered the deals between pro-Russian eastern Ukrainian separatists and Kyiv authorities in Minsk in 2015 – had betrayed Russia and were now flooding Ukraine with weapons.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the architect of these agreements with then French President François Hollande, said in an interview published on Wednesday by the German weekly Die Zeit that the objective was then to “give time to the ‘Ukraine’ so that it can strengthen its defenses.
In his speech on Friday, Vladimir Putin said he was “disappointed” by the remarks made by the ex-chancellor.
Negotiated in February 2015 by Germany and France in the Belarusian capital, the Minsk agreements aimed to settle the conflict then underway in Ukraine between the central power of Kyiv and the pro-Russian separatists in the East, providing in particular for a cease -fire, a withdrawal of heavy weapons from the field and a political process.
(Reporting Reuters, editing by Kevin Liffey; French version Myriam Rivet, editing by Kate Entringer)
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