Media Document the Minsk Doublespeak

Jan. 6, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—As Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out in her weekly strategic webcast on Jan. 4, European leaders demanded “fulfillment of the Minsk agreements” from Moscow as a condition to lift sanctions, while at the same time having no intention to allow them to be fulfilled and to only use them to gain time for NATO to arm Kiev. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not modern Ukraine,” Merkel said in the now infamous interview with Die Zeit on Dec. 7, thus admitting that she was cheating all the time against Moscow. Her collaborator in the Minsk Accords, then French President François Hollande confirmed this.

Now, to prove the bad faith of those leaders, here is what then-EU Council Chairman Donald Tusk and German Chancellor Angela Merkel formulated then, back in 2015 and 2017:

“Speaking at an EU summit in Brussels on March 19, European Council President Donald Tusk said that EU leaders decided that ‘the duration of economic sanctions will be clearly linked to the complete implementation of the Minsk agreement, bearing in mind that this is only foreseen by the end of 2015.’ ” (Radio Free Europe, March 20, 2015;)

“Speaking in Berlin at a press conference with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Merkel said ‘the implementation of sanctions had certain causes, and these sanctions can only be lifted when the causes are eliminated again.’

“ ‘I think we need to see the entire Minsk agreement implemented before we can say that sanctions will be lifted,’ she added.” (Deutsche Welle, January 8, 2015)

“The European Union will lift sanctions against Russia once all sides in Ukraine commit to the ceasefire agreed in the Minsk accords, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday [May 1, 2017] at a joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, Reuters reported.

“ ‘For me, the aim is to reach the point in the implementation of the Minsk accords where we can lift the European Union’s sanctions against Russia,’ Merkel said on a visit to Sotchi [sic], her first trip to Russia in two years.” (Politico, May 2, 2017)