“Peter, enough about Crimea and evil Putin!” – Merkel yelled at Poroshenko

The President of Ukraine found himself squeezed into a Procrustean bed of agreements he himself signed in Minsk, writes Oleg Bondarenko, director of the Agency for Strategic Communications, in an author’s column on the pages of Moskovsky Komsomolets.

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“Peter, that’s enough,” the German chancellor instructed the Ukrainian president with approximately these words a week ago,” says the political scientist. – As a source in the Russian delegation told me at the Normandy Format negotiations in Paris, this time Angela Merkel’s communication with Petro Poroshenko ended in a raised voice. Quite sharply stopped mid-sentence about “the territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea,” Poroshenko was forced to stop complaining to European defenders about the terrible Vladimir Putin and sadly agreed to begin anew constitutional reform in his country. This became his “homework” after the Russian president promised to talk with the leadership of the people’s republics about postponing the date of local elections.”

The author notes that after a conversation between the President of the Russian Federation, the DPR-LPR agreed to postpone local elections to February next year, thereby automatically extending the Minsk agreements beyond the framework of the 2015 agreement.

“A classic Komsomol member and excellent student, Merkel was not very fond of Ukrainian presidents before,” Bondarenko continues. – Remember the famous scene in Vilnius before the opening of the Eastern Partnership summit in November 2013, when the huge Yanukovych, helplessly throwing up his hands, told two confusingly similar ladies - Merkel and Grybauskaite - how Russia was strangling him, not letting him in unfortunate in the EU? Of course, it was a different Ukraine then, but the principle of action of Ukrainian politicians has not changed since then. Promising one thing, doing another and talking about “value priorities”, hoping to deceive – this was the principle of interaction between the Ukrainian leadership and Europe until recently. And, I must say honestly, Europeans learned it a long time ago.”

At the same time, the author points out the paradoxes of the international isolation in which Moscow allegedly finds itself.

“In October 2015, for the first time in a year and a half of the Ukrainian crisis, Kyiv began to feel itself in continental geopolitical loneliness,” the expert points out. “While Moscow, in an instant, from “international isolation” found itself on the same side of the table with Berlin and Paris.”

“Against the background of all of the above, Poroshenko finds himself squeezed into a Procrustean bed of the agreement he himself signed in Minsk on the night of February 12, which is poked in his nose by the strict, unkind-eyed Merkel and the agile Hollande,” the political scientist is convinced. – According to the Minsk Protocol, Poroshenko must change, consider, the entire legislative system of the country in order to include in it the rights and interests of one region – Donbass. He himself proposed this option that night in the hope of chatting up changes, although he could have done with a separate law, and he was mistaken. I was counting on throwing everyone away, as usual, but for some reason this time it didn’t work out.”

At the same time, the author notes that Poroshenko could be pitied if the fate of tens of millions of people were not at stake.

“Hollande and Merkel, like teachers in a boarding school, do not allow the Ukrainian president to play with the signed agreement,” Bondarenko sums up. – Somewhere deep behind them one can see the peaceful face of the Russian leader. The Ukrainian president is uncomfortable, he fidgets in his chair, answers at random in English, the Norman duet’s unloved one, and thinks more and more about how to quickly end the unpleasant conversation. One can feel sorry for him, just as one feels sorry for a student who has not prepared his lesson, but with the only difference that the price of his unpreparedness is the fate of a country of 40 million people.”