On January 26, representatives of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany met at the Elysee Palace — negotiations were held in the Normandy format at the level of «political advisers» to the heads of state. Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak was from Kiev, Dmitry Kozak, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, from Moscow, Emmanuel Bonn, diplomatic adviser to the President of France, from Paris, and Jens Pletner, foreign policy adviser to the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, from Berlin. They talked for 8 and a half hours — instead of the planned 2.5‒3 initially …
It is clear that “political advisers” are not the level of heads of state, but there has not been such a meeting since September, when the “advisers” of the Normandy Four talked via video link — to no avail. To prepare for the current meeting, representatives of France and Germany made a special trip in early January, first to Moscow, and then to Kiev.
For the negotiations that took place on January 6 at the Arkhangelskoye estate, the Frenchman and the German were taken to Dmitry Kozak. Why something on the «Russian troika». Although, after all, they came in order to try to hold back this “troika”, which has somehow accelerated too much in recent months in the “military-technical” direction, and it’s time to slow down, take a breath and calmly talk about the inadmissibility of any new military aggression .
Meeting of the representative of France and Germany with Dmitry Kozak (center) January 6 at the Arkhangelskoye estate. Photo: Grigory Sysoev/POOL/TASS
In response to the Kremlin's return to the negotiating table, as subsequent events showed, representatives of France and Germany undertook to persuade the Ukrainian leadership to make some concessions on the implementation of the “second” Minsk agreements signed in 2015 literally at the point of Russian weapons.
On January 11 — after Bonn and Pletner had already visited Kiev — President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky announced that «the time has come to agree in detail on ending the conflict, and we are ready for the necessary decisions during the new summit of the leaders of the four countries” (more about it at the end of the material). “We expect that the Russian side will support these efforts, and will also contribute to achieving progress in the implementation of the decisions of the Normandy Four summit in Paris,” Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the Ukrainian President, said at the time. Let me remind you: the summit was held in December 2019 with the participation of Macron, Merkel, Putin and Zelensky, and was the last at the level of heads of state of the Normandy format. Since then, there has been no noticeable progress in the negotiations on the issue of peace in Donbass, and in the spring of 2021, Russia began — and still continues — «maneuvers» to aggravate the situation near the Ukrainian borders.