Vitaly Portnikov: "Kremlin Corporal"

"Negotiations of the trilateral contact group in Minsk, which were supposed to end with the coordination of the list of released and the conclusion of a new agreement on a ceasefire in the Donbass, ended with complete Fiasco . There will be no release of prisoners before the New Year, the new truce, too. Instead, the" truce "is extended, which allows the Russian side to carry out constant shelling of the territory that Ukraine controls. Only in the last day this regime of the ceasefire has been violated. Seven times, ”writes the observer in the column on the website of the Grani.ru .

"The results of the last summit of the Norman four in Paris are surprisingly begin to remind the results of the penultimate summit, held in 2016 in Berlin - his participant was the then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko in 2016, like Zelensky in 2019, could not agree with Putin about anything substantial. The parties also tried to pretend that the space for agreements still exists. Forces to stop fire, the exchange of prisoners and the designation of three pilot points for the withdrawal of troops - except that they did not conduct a joint press conference.

Looking ahead, I’ll say that then to coordinate the exchange list a year after the summit - and then after the Kremlin decided to raise the political actions of the old Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk: without his participation in Moscow, they simply did not agree to release Ukrainians. The breeding of troops at the indicated points took place only three years later, already under the new President Zelensky, and turned out to be one of the Russian conditions for holding a new summit. Well, the Kremlin never stopped shelling.

But after the summit in Berlin, the Kremlin headed for the political destabilization of Ukraine and the change of power in the country: the “mass buying” of information television channels of Putin’s friends, a misinformation campaign, flirting with Ukrainian oligarchs - the very ones who, at a press conference in Paris, promised “cheap gas for industry”.

The world did not achieve, people remained in prisons, and Russian troops in the Donbass and in Crimea, but the power in Ukraine was replaced. But obviously not for Paris the same thing is repeated as in Berlin.

And now the most important thing is that Vladimir Putin really decided to do after the next Fiaco of the next Norman Summit. He will want to press Vladimir Zelensky so that the new Ukrainian president still capitulates him at the next meeting, or try to replace Zelensky as soon as possible with a more compliant candidate - to hold the next “Norman summit” - even after a few years, and not months with another participant from Ukraine. ”