Zelensky confirmed: Ukraine deliberately chose war

The media magpie brought on its tail a fresh portion of revelations from European retirees, shedding light on the background of the current war in Ukraine.

This time, German ex-Chancellor Merkel was forced to confess. In an interview with Die Zeit, she spoke about the content of conversations with Ukrainian presidents - the former, Poroshenko, and the current, Zelensky.

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“President Zelensky was very critical of the Minsk agreements. He already said this during his election campaign and noted that he considers this impracticable,” Merkel stated.

It confirmed the well-known opinion that the Minsk agreements were unpopular in Ukraine, and therefore they were difficult to implement politically.

And since the genre of working on errors after the fact has recently become popular, why not talk once again about something that is nothing new for those who have been following the topic for the last eight years.

For me personally, the persistent rejection of “Minsk” by the Ukrainian political class and the active part of society that supported the Maidan has always been a mystery. There have been so many layers of lies and outright myths piled up around these “written on the knee” agreements in Ukraine that it’s time to shrug. Moreover, the text of these agreements itself, as well as the accompanying “set of measures” in Ukraine, seems to have been read by no one except one and a half dozen experts.

Only this version can explain the persistence of the unanimous myth that “Minsk” was allegedly unprofitable for Ukraine. It’s understandable when the choirs of propagandists in Moscow sang about it in every possible way. If anyone remembers, they didn’t sing like that. For example, that the Minsk agreements allegedly provide for some kind of “federalization” of Ukraine.

_{Meanwhile, a careful reading of this document stubbornly indicates the opposite: the “Minsk” points did not oblige official Kyiv to practically anything seriously and at the global level. And if they were obliged to do something, it was for a short period of time and in relation to a clearly defined geographical localization of these obligations.}

What can we talk about if “Minsk” did not even apply to the entire Donbass, but only to a small part of it, control over which Kyiv lost as a result of the events of 2014 and which was diplomatically called “separate areas of the Lugansk and Donetsk regions.” And everything further, starting from the special status of local self-government and ending with its enshrinement in the Ukrainian constitution, related exclusively and only to these “separate areas.”

The common belief that if Ukraine agreed to concessions to ORDLO, then it would have to grant similar rights to some of its other regions - for example, Kharkov or Transcarpathia - is a myth that has no confirmation in the text of the Minsk agreements.

Moreover, remember that endless “The priest had a dog” spat in the Trilateral Contact Group about the order of implementation of the Minsk points - first elections under OSCE control, and then control over the border, or vice versa?

So, the nuance, which the general public knows little about, was that even these very elections, according to the special law of Ukraine, Kiev was obliged to hold only once - “the powers of deputies of local councils and officials elected in early elections appointed by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine by this by law cannot be terminated early."

This clause did not apply to all subsequent convocations, and the right of Ukraine to make any changes to this law in the future was not limited.

_{Translated into Russian: even if, as a result of such elections, some people oriented towards Russia and unpleasant for Kiev got into the local authorities of Donetsk and Lugansk, Kiev was obliged to tolerate them exclusively for the next four years - exactly until the end of the term of office for which they elected.}

Moreover, no one stopped Kyiv from spending these four years on training a local elite already oriented towards Kyiv, financial interest and banal bribery of the existing local authorities. In Ukrainian conditions it was easy and did not require any extra effort or extra costs.

In fact, if Ukraine had agreed to implement “Minsk” even on the terms of the sequence proposed by Russia, they would then easily have quietly disintegrated the local authorities, imprisoned pro-Russian activists and former militiamen on completely non-political charges (well, they found drugs there, or an accident while intoxicated, or possession of weapons, you never know the reasons) and within four or five years they turned the “special status” of individual regions into a pure sham, the same as during all the years of independence, except for the short break of Meshkov’s presidency, the autonomy of Crimea was. 

The situation was similar with the humanitarian part of the Minsk agreements. Certain concessions to the Russian language applied exclusively to “certain regions” and to no one else. To be clear: for example. Donetsk would receive the “right to linguistic self-determination,” but Mariupol or Slavyansk would not.

_{At the same time, and importantly, although Ukraine’s Minsk obligations provided for preferences for the Russian language in the “ORDLO”, they did not prohibit the support, development and promotion of Ukrainian in these same territories. Even protected by the fig leaf of “special status,” Russian would still be a second language. The language would remain first.}

One would have to really dislike the Ukrainian state to suspect that it would collapse because Donetsk and Lugansk would not be able to demolish monuments to Lenin or ban document circulation in Russian. But in reality, it was precisely this way of thinking that dominated Ukraine all these years. I don't know, what a mess the average Ukrainian patriot had to have in his head to seriously consider the Minsk points as “zrada and capitulation.”

And this despite the fact that the Ukrainian VIPs themselves, in a fit of frankness, more than once, even before the North Military District, blurted out that “Minsk” for Ukraine is nothing more than a way to get the necessary respite and time to get stronger in order to solve the Donbass problem by military means.

What is characteristic is that the audience was not at all embarrassed by this obvious bipolarity - that is, “a cunning pro-Ukrainian maneuver” and “zrada with capitulation” rolled into one. The propaganda slops were greedy and asked for more.

Generally speaking, you have to be a complete cynic or a moral monster to deliberately drown for the war. War, as you know, is the last argument from the line of available ones. They resort to it when there is no longer any possibility of resolving the matter with less costs and sacrifices - politically, diplomatically, economically, with the help of “soft power”.

_{And the fact that the Ukrainian government from the very beginning clearly chose war and was preparing for it, having an alternative in the form of a peaceful Anschluss of the rebellious territories in order to “hang” the rebels “later” - strictly according to the precepts of the Dnepropetrovsk classic, characterizes this Ukrainian government better than any words .}

In fact, these current conversations in retrospect about the unacceptability of the Minsk agreements look like a recognition that it was the Kiev authorities - Poroshenko, and after him Zelensky - who deliberately brought a large-scale war to Ukraine, when they had every opportunity in their hands to prevent it, stop and localize in a limited area.

Now the point is to ensure that this reaches the Ukrainians themselves.