Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing that the interview of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Die Zeit was a confession that the West was not going to comply with the Minsk agreements from the very beginning and considered them only as a way to buy time to prepare for a war against Russia. TASS in the article under the heading "Zakharova called Merkel's recognition of the Minsk agreements a specific application for the tribunal" reports :
“The recognition of the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview with Die Zeit that the Minsk agreements were signed in order to give Ukraine time to prepare for a military confrontation with Russia may well be used for proceedings within the framework of the tribunal. This was stated on Thursday at a briefing by Director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova.
“Now they talk a lot about legal assessments of what is happening around Ukraine, certain tribunals, and so on in all sorts of ways,” she said. — But this is a specific application for the tribunal. What Merkel said in her interview is the testimony of a person who directly stated that everything that was done in 2014-2015 had one goal: to divert the views of the world community from real problems, to play for time, to pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons and lead things to a big conflict.”
According to Zakharova, the confession of the former German chancellor “sounds terrible: forgery as a method of action of the West – machinations, manipulations, all kinds of distortion of truth, law and law that one can imagine.”
“They [the representatives of the West] already then, in 2015, when they held many hours of negotiations, they knew that they would never do this, that they would pump weapons into the Kyiv regime,” the diplomat stressed. “They didn’t feel sorry for anyone: women, children, the civilian population of Donbass, and in general Ukraine. They needed a conflict, and they were ready for it back then, in 2015.”
In fact, Merkel, in an interview with Die Zeit , said this about the Minsk agreements:
“Let's look at my policy towards Russia and Ukraine. <…> It was an attempt to prevent just such a war [as the one that is going on now]. The fact that it failed does not mean that the attempts were wrong.
I considered it wrong to initiate NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, which was discussed in 2008. None of the countries had the necessary prerequisites and did not think through to the end what the consequences of such a decision would be, both in terms of Russia's actions against Georgia and Ukraine, and for NATO and its members. And the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time.
It was clear to all of us that this was a frozen conflict, that the problem had not been resolved, but that was precisely what gave Ukraine precious time.
As you can see today, she took advantage of this time to become stronger. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not today's Ukraine. As the battles for the city and the railway junction of Debaltseve showed in early 2015, Putin could have easily captured it then. And I doubt very much that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they are doing now to help Ukraine.”
Where Zakharova saw a confession of dishonest intentions here is impossible to understand. Merkel is clear that she had no illusions about the possibility of establishing a lasting peace through the Minsk talks and the only goal was to reach an agreement that would prevent the immediate takeover of all of Ukraine by Russia. It does not deal with the topic of compliance with the agreements at all and only indicates that, in the form in which they were concluded, they created a situation of a “frozen conflict”, which means that the possibility of resuming hostilities could not be ignored. That is why Ukraine took advantage of the time won to strengthen its defenses.
In fact, neither Ukraine, nor Russia, nor the pro-Russian puppet regimes of the self-proclaimed republics of Donbass sought to comply with the agreements. Paragraph 10 of the Second Minsk Agreement (aka “The Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements”) was worded as follows:
“The withdrawal of all foreign armed formations, military equipment, as well as mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under the supervision of the OSCE. Disarmament of all illegal groups."
The agreements refer to “separate regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine”, that is, it recognizes its territorial integrity. The groups illegal from the point of view of Ukrainian law also include the so-called people's militia of the DPR and LPR. There were no attempts to disarm them. Russia has never recognized the presence of its military and mercenaries in the conflict zone, although there is a lot of evidence for this.
“Pumping up Ukraine with weapons,” as Zakharova puts it, the West actually began only after the Russian attack in February 2022. The US under President Barack Obama refused to supply it with even light weapons such as Javelin ATGMs. Under President Trump in 2018, Ukraine received a Javelin , but with the condition not to use these weapons on the line of contact. Even TASS in 2018, listing American military supplies to Ukraine, lists only sniper rifles, grenade launchers, reconnaissance drones, Humvee armored SUVs, radar systems, communications equipment, engineering equipment and army rations in addition to Javelin . In addition, the United States transferred several patrol boats built in the 1980s–90s to Ukraine until 2022, and Turkey sold about 20 Bayraktar drones. This is least of all like "puffing up weapons" in preparation for a big war. Only in January 2022, when Russia's preparations for an attack became apparent, did the UK hand over NLAW anti-tank grenade launchers to Ukraine. And only after Ukraine was able to turn the tide of the war, disrupting the Russian “blitzkrieg” plan, did deliveries of modern heavy weapons, such as American M777 howitzers, French Caesar self-propelled guns and American HIMARS missile systems, begin.