The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that a confession made by German ex-chancellor Angela Merkel concerning the Minsk agreements might be used as evidence in a tribunal against Western leaders for provoking the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Kiev.
In April of 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained that the war in Ukraine was due to the failure to implement the Minsk Accords, noting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated publicly that Ukraine "does not like" any clause of the Minsk Agreements and "rejected it publicly," at a time where Russia considered it "simply impossible to continue to tolerate this genocide that was going on for eight years [Ukrainian bombing of the Donbas since 2014]."
In an interview with Die Zeit, Merkel openly stated that "the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine."
Maria Zakharova, Russian MFA spokesperson, said that Merkel's interview, "horrifyingly” reveals that the West uses “forgery as a method of action." She explained how Germany and France, both of whom were involved in the Normandy format meetings that resulted in the Minsk Agreements, "already knew back then, in 2015, when they were holding hours-long talks, that they would never execute this and that they would pump the Kiev regime with weapons."
Zakharova noted that Kiev continuously stated that they will not implement the Minsk Accords but "the West, those countries and their leaders who were directly involved in the Normandy format have never stated this so clearly." This came to show, according to the MFA spokesperson, "what Berlin really thought" during the drafting of the Minsk Agreements.
More importantly, Zakharova highlighted that the Merkel confessions are "evidence that everything that was worked out and presented to the world as agreements and became part of international law in the form of a UN Security Council resolution, binding on every state, was a fabrication," adding "It was a flirtation with the use of international law for the sole purpose of pumping the Kiev regime with weapons, to prepare politically for the start of hostilities."
Moreover, the MFA spokesperson argued that the West "talks a lot about legal assessments of what is happening around Ukraine, certain tribunals and so on in all sorts of ways," adding that "this is a specific reason for a tribunal.”
“They did not feel sorry for anyone: women, children, the civilian population of Donbass or the whole of Ukraine," Zakharova commented, "They needed a conflict and they were ready for it back then, in 2015."