An agreement will be necessary “in the end” to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin said on Friday, while expressing doubts about the “trust” that Moscow can, according to him, grant to its interlocutors.
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“In the end, we will have to find an agreement. I have already said several times that we are ready for these arrangements, we are open, but this forces us to think about who we are dealing with,” said the Russian president, on the sidelines of a regional summit in Kyrgyzstan. .
Vladimir Putin was reacting to recent remarks by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel who said the 2014 Minsk agreement between Moscow and Kiev, signed under the aegis of the OSCE, had given Ukraine time to strengthen itself in the event of an armed conflict with Russia.
“The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time. She took advantage of it, as we see today. The Ukraine of 2014/2015 is not the Ukraine of today. (…) As we saw in early 2015, Putin could easily have crushed him at the time,” she told Die Zeit newspaper.
Vladimir Putin said he was “disappointed” by these remarks. “That obviously raises the issue of trust. And trust is almost at zero and after such statements the question, of course, is: How to find an agreement? And can we get along with someone? And with what guarantees?
“Maybe we should have started all this earlier (the offensive in Ukraine). But we were in fact counting on the possibility of finding an agreement within the framework of the Minsk agreements, ”he added.