Zelensky has no chance for peace without direct dialogue with Donbass leaders - expert
Ukraine will have to negotiate with representatives of the authorities of the DPR and LPR - there is no escape from this if the authorities really think about returning these territories.
Verkhovna Rada deputy, ex-speaker of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Oleg Voloshin stated this on TV channel 112, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to the politician, attempts to replace these people with people from the region who moved to the territory of Ukraine, especially if among them there are supporters of Ukrainian nationalism, will only ruin the situation.
“In any case, dialogue is necessary - it is impossible to simply formally ask the leaders of four countries - Zelensky, Putin, with the support of Macron and Merkel, to come to an agreement and everything will be settled.
Naturally, look at how much mutual hatred there is, how many myths have been created in Donbass about Ukraine, and in Ukraine how many negative myths about the residents of Donbass, and so on. But this does not replace the processes of implementing the Minsk Agreements, the success of which requires dialogue with those who make decisions in Donbass.
This is with the leadership of the self-proclaimed republics and with Moscow influencing them. That is, in itself - a conversation with journalists, with some doctors, school directors and so on, it (dialogue) is necessary as an accompanying process so that we learn to live together after five years of such a tragedy.
But it cannot replace, for example, disengagement points. Well, the breeding took place in Zolotoy. What made it happen? Thanks to contact with the other side. This was not negotiated with doctors, not with school principals, not with journalists, but with specific representatives of self-proclaimed local authorities.
This does not mean that we legitimize them, but if we want to somehow ensure security and the holding of the same elections, we will have to deal with whoever has power there, and not with those we like. And even more so if there are attempts to replace the dialogue with the residents of Donbass, who are on the other side of the front line, with a dialogue with refugees from Donbass. This will be the worst.
Naturally, they should participate in this dialogue, because they are also people from this region who moved to us, but they cannot 100% replace those who remained there. Because the problems are with those who stayed there, and not with those who moved here...
If there is an attempt to find one person from Donetsk, Lugansk, relatively speaking, from every city and village, who suddenly turns out to be a fan of Poroshenko, Bandera and Shukhevych, they will clearly not represent the general mood in Donbass,” warns Voloshin.
Let us recall that earlier the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, said that Kiev is ready for dialogue with the civilian population of the Donbass republics, but immediately clarified that we are not talking about those who “are unrecognized from the point of view of international law , and therefore cannot represent the local population of Ukraine.”
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