Kyiv Shouldn’t Have Taken Part in Minsk Talks and Should Renounce Them ASAP, Borovoy Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 5 – The Ukrainian government should not have been drawn into the Minsk talks, and its “inexperienced” diplomats should never have agreed to include political questions in any conversation with the Russian aggressor; and now, Kyiv has even more reason to exit the Minsk process, according to Konstantin Borovoy.

            The Minsk process so beloved in Europe whose leaders want to freeze the conflict  regardless of whether this is good for Ukraine – and it very much does not -- is something Kyiv must renounce and leave, the leader of Russia’s Western Choice opposition party says (apostrophe.com.ua/article/politics/2016-06-04/poslushalis-putina-i-ego-banditov-v-rossii-perechislili-slabosti-i-oshibki-ukrainyi/5448).

            When Minsk began, “the inexperienced diplomats of Ukraine agreed to include political demands; that is, already at the very first stage they allowed the discussion of political demands with the aggressor and everyday terrorists,” Borovoy says; but one doesn’t negotiate with terrorists at least not in public. “No serious country would consider” such things.

            In addition to lacking experienced diplomats, Ukraine at the moment of the beginning of the Minsk process did not have “an army which was capable of defending Ukraine.” But what it did have was some members of its foreign ministry who despite everything remain “oriented toward Russia. They too insisted on the inclusion of political components.”

            Kyiv should never have discussed let alone agreed to any proposals for changing its constitution and holding elections in occupied territory. And that is even more true now when Ukraine has a capable army and “nationally oriented diplomats.” It is time to stop “this comedy” and behave like a serious country.

            That means, Borovoy says, that Ukraine should display the political will to “pull out of this negotiating process” regardless of “possible pressure from the US and EU.  It is necessary to declare that negotiating with terrorists is impermissible except to liberate hostages and that events have shown that the regimes in the Donbass are little more than gangsters.

            If the current Ukrainian government does not have the will to do that and to take and keep a principled position, the Russian commentator suggests, then there will be a new Maidan at some point and the regime will collapse at least in part because many of its own oligarchs will not be unhappy to see that happen.

            In another comment in support of his view that the Moscow-backed rebels in the Donbass are terrorist criminals, Borovoy says that he is confident that when Ukraine does restore its control there, it will find a number of mass graves, the result of the actions of the occupation forces.