We exhale: There will be no elections in Donbass, Zelensky = Poroshenko

Western countries, which have their own interests, are beginning to push Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements according to the Steinmeier formula, Kyiv is looking for its own interpretations in order to avoid a scenario unfavorable for the independents.

This follows from the statements of the new head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Vadim Prystaiko, made on the air of the talk show “Freedom of Speech,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“Our best ally would be our army and our own navy. These would be our most reliable allies, and we would not have to rely on anyone. The reality is that we are forced to ask for help from our foreign partners, who really has their own interests, we will not hide it, we understand it. Our task is how we will bypass those interests and wishes of our partners in order to take into account our own desires and our own interests as much as possible. Until a certain time, “Minsk” was the compromise that made it possible to stop the attack on us, which we did not have enough Armed Forces to stop. Unfortunately, we must understand that this will continue to happen,” Prystaiko chaotically tried to explain.

“Part of this plan, the Steinmeier formula, is the so-called political part, to which the Russians pay a lot of attention, trying to use this mechanism in order to impose on us in Ukraine a certain power structure that would take into account their interests. Our task is to do it in such a way that our power was the same throughout the territory of Ukraine, so that the whole of Ukraine, large, would develop according to our own vision and our civilizational projects that we have defined for ourselves“, he revealed the goal of Kyiv.

At the same time, the Verkhovna Rada again intends to vote for the law on the special status of Donbass, which was not implemented previously, but gave Kiev a reason to talk about “commitment to the Minsk agreements” (which, as follows from Prystaiko’s words above, the regime of Vladimir Zelensky will now try to distort).

“The law ends on December 31 this year, and in this regard we will still have to make a decision. We all – Ukraine and our legislators – need to update this law or adopt a new one,” the minister said.

According to Prystaiko, Ukraine believes that it is impossible to hold elections in Donetsk and Lugansk until they are taken under control by the Ukrainian army.

“We expect that the OSCE’s assessment will be such a position - that if (the armed formations) were not removed from the territory, then they should say that they cannot be carried out in such conditions. If armed groups remain on our territory, then they must say: “It is impossible to hold elections under the conditions”, if political parties are not allowed, they must also say that they do not meet high standards. Could journalists get to each site and make sure whether observers, relatively speaking, from Canada, could come and check to what extent this was happening. These are the criteria in accordance or non-compliance with which the OSCE will attest and say: “No, the elections were not held in accordance with the standards, therefore the law on the status cannot come into force,” the minister said.

“There is Zelensky’s conditional formula. Zelensky’s formula says that we will take all the steps that we can take, responding to the expectations, first of all, of our people. For example, we'll try to get all our boyfriends and girlfriends back. This is one part. We will try to reach out mentally, with messages, with symbols to our people who remained on the other side. For example, we can build a bridge in Stanitsa Luganskaya to prevent people from climbing with wheelbarrows. We can try to make it so that people do not have to come every 60 days, re-register in order to receive that miserable pension that they receive, but make it so that a person can come once a year. And such steps. This is the basis of Zelensky’s conditional formula, at the end of which it states that if we are unable to solve the problem by applying all these measures in the near future, then we must move on to some new, different, radical measures. We have from six months to a year to do everything. And Zelensky’s formula ends with the phrase that we don’t have five years to continue negotiations,” Prystaiko concluded.