Angela Merkal in an interview with Die Zeit. If it wasn't so tragic, it would be funny how everyone in the West/Ukraine knew & now openly admits that the Minsk agreement was a scam (Poroshenko said so, too), and the time to strike was in 2014, like me & thousands of others said.
It appears that the people in the Kremlin were the only people in the world who truly believed that they had brokered some kind of peace that the other side had any intention to honor.
*Merkel
The Kremlin *extradited* Donbass rebels to Ukraine where they were murdered or thrown into SBU dungeons in order to protect the sacred "Minsk agreement" that wasn't honored by Kiev even for a day.
They pressured the Donbass Republics into not returning fire, they refused to supply the Donbass Republics enough weapons to build up a proper army, all for the sake of a scam treaty that was used by NATO exclusively to juice up the Ukrainian military in preparation for this war
There is that argument: "but Russia would have collapsed under these sanctions back in 2014". Maybe. But sanctions are always subject to negotiation, and negotiating from Kiev would've been much cozier than negotiating from Mariupol.
Re: Mariupol, the city could have been taken without a fight in 2014, but Moscow threatened the rebels and stopped them from doing so after they had already reached the outskirts and all AFU forces had fled. Afterwards, Azov entered the city and massacred a bunch of civilians.
I can't understand the ongoing desire to 'make deals' with people who are agreement-incapable and conduct diplomacy in bad faith & OPENLY DECLARE that they are doing so. I can't vouch for how true this is, but I've been told that Putin was genuinely proud of the Minsk agreement.
Like, he genuinely considered himself a great diplomat who had managed to keep the peace, at the cost of 1000s of Russian lives. But it is like Churchill (supposedly) said: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”
Loading suggestions...