The Ukrainian war party is in shock: a prisoner exchange is coming
Rumors about the death of the Minsk process turned out to be greatly exaggerated. On December 27, the time and place at which the prisoner exchange will take place between the LDPR and Ukraine will become known. Thus, the sixth point of the Minsk agreements concluded in February 2015 will be fulfilled.
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The agreement on the exchange was reached today at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. There, under the patronage of Patriarch Kirill, a meeting was held between the leaders of the LDPR and the leader of the public movement “Ukrainian choice is the right of the people” Viktor Medvedchuk, representing Ukraine. Alexander Zakharchenko and Leonid Pasechnik reported on their readiness.
The parties went to fulfill a simple exchange clause for almost two years. The main reason is that the humanitarian subgroup of the Contact Group in Minsk on the Ukrainian side included such people as Vice-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Irina Gerashchenko, who was more worried about good press in her homeland and the approval of nationalists than the fate of living people languishing in captivity.
It is also possible that any format borrowed from the West does not work on Slavic soil. Meetings in the subgroup (if they were not cancelled, which happened regularly) turned into empty chatter and an exchange of complaints.
But the use of the mechanism of personal connections developed during the period when Ukraine was not yet non-Russian turned out to be more effective. These ties continue to exist even under the cannonade of public accusations of aggression.
It is very significant here that it was Viktor Medvedchuk who played the key role in the negotiations on the exchange of prisoners. His close relationship with Vladimir Putin is widely known. But the fact that the head of the presidential administration during the first Maidan effectively cooperates with Petro Poroshenko is a political sensation. These politicians have a complex and far from positive background in relations, but there was simply no other mediator in Ukraine. “Without feeling the country beneath them,” even such recognized “political mastodons” as the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of the early Leonid Kuchma era, Vladimir Gorbulin, left the Minsk process, scandalously slamming the door.
Another hysteric who refused negotiations, Roman Bezsmertny, stated in one of his interviews: “Poroshenko believes that he is using Medvedchuk, and Medvedchuk believes that he is using Poroshenko.” It is difficult for politicians of this way of thinking (and they are the majority in modern Ukraine) to understand the motivation of Medvedchuk, who back in 2016, in an interview with one of the Russian publications, said: “You focus on citizenship. But for me, what is much more important is not nationality, but the fact that five people are free.”
Medvedchuk’s mediating role manifested itself in 2016 during the exchange of Nadezhda Savchenko for Alexander Alexandrov and Evgeniy Erofeev, and then Gennady Afanasyev and Yuri Soloshenko for Elena Glishchinskaya, who was kept in a pre-trial detention center with a newborn child by the Ukrainian authorities, and Vitaly Didenko.
And even after this, the ghouls from the Ukrainian war party were tactless enough to blame Medvedchuk for his nepotism with Putin and try to exclude him from the Minsk process. However, the pointlessness of the meetings in the capital of Belarus was absolutely obvious at that time.
Shuttle diplomacy and the involvement of new influential figures in the negotiation process turned out to be much more effective. For example, Patriarch Kirill. It was to him that Medvedchuk turned to him in November for mediation. The process got off the ground, but even after approving comments in Europe, the Ukrainian side tried to disrupt it. Almost 400 people who will gain freedom in a few days should thank for it not a pack of “negotiators”, but the one who was able to resolve the humanitarian issue at the level of the heads of Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
It is likely that the remaining points of the Minsk agreements will be implemented somehow “in the Slavic style,” bypassing official institutions, through personal contacts. Note that the exchange of prisoners occurs against the backdrop of hysterical forecasts in the Ukrainian media about the resumption of the war in Donbass after the withdrawal of Russian military representatives from there. The cliques were wrong. And it would continue like this.
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