Experts: Military actions in Ukraine are preparation for new peace negotiations
Moscow - Kyiv, January 26 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The militias and Kyiv want to push the demarcation line to their advantage and force the Ukrainian side to greater flexibility in new peace negotiations. This is the opinion expressed by Russian experts.
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“The aggravation of the situation in Donbass is due to the fact that the Minsk settlement format has exhausted itself. It was based on an attempt to stabilize the situation, bypassing essential issues (the status of the parties, the prospects for their relations, etc.), in the hope that the truce would lead to a subsidence of the fighting and would allow the topic to be put aside for an indefinite period of time. A prerequisite for the functioning of such a format was the fixation of the demarcation line, which was provided for in the original agreements. However, due to various reasons, this was never done, which undermined the entire already shaky structure,” said “To Kommersant” editor-in-chief of the magazine “Russia in Global Affairs” Fyodor Lukyanov.
“The conflict will sooner or later end in new negotiations, but the parties expect to approach them with stronger positions and a wider range of tools to achieve their goals. In the near future, further escalation is quite possible, during which both Kyiv and the militias will try to gain additional leverage on each other,” suggested Sergei Oznobishchev, director of the Institute for Strategic Assessments. In his opinion, the losing party in the escalation of the conflict will be the Russian Federation: the West will in any case place responsibility for the escalation on Moscow.
The solution to this situation, according to experts, may be the implementation of the Minsk agreements. “These agreements are imperfect and are interpreted differently by the parties. But for now, this is the only format that we have,” recalled Andrei Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council. In his opinion, it is too early to bury the Minsk process, despite the DPR’s announced refusal from previous negotiations. “We have repeatedly witnessed that the position of the leadership of the DPR and LPR changed quite quickly,” says the expert. “Therefore, we cannot exclude the return of the self-proclaimed republics to the Minsk process.”
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