On the 9th December 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin gathered in Normandy, France to sign a ceasefire agreement over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine capturing the Crimea region and placing its troops in the Donbas region. The Russians started a war in the Donbas region and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with French President Emmanuel Macron intervened as mediators to come up with a ceasefire.
The Normandy meeting was supposed to enforce a ceasefire that was already approved and signed under the the Minsk Agreements of 2014. Russia never applied the Minsk Agreement: it kept using heavy weapons to attack Ukrainian positions on a regular basis. From 2014 to 2022 before its massive invasion, Russia killed up to 4,000 Ukrainian civilians and displaced up to 2.6 million Ukrainians from the Donbas region, yet, European leaders kept pressuring the Ukrainian government to enter in peace talks with Russia and sign even more futile agreements with Vladimir Putin that weren’t even worth the paper they were signed on. Throughout Russia’s war on Ukraine from 2014 to 2022, Ukraine was always told to seek peace and diplomacy while Russia only escalated its actions.
It wasn’t just enough that Russia had invaded a sovereign country and occupied its territory – unprovoked and uninvited. Ukraine didn’t even have a proper army during that time with lackluster equipment and no air-force or navy. Yet, despite the fact that Ukraine didn’t pose any threat to Russia, Russia invaded and felt entitled to some sort of wrapped justice in which the aggressor was right. Russia wanted recognition of its newly acquired territory: the Crimea.
In Normandy, on the 9th December 2019, another ceasefire agreement was supposedly reached. Vladimir Putin threatened Europeans with gas supplies and as always, lied to everyone about enforcing yet another ceasefire agreement. It was the last time that President Zelensky would meet with Vladimir Putin.
Today, the US is doing the same to Ukraine as Germany and France did to it in 2019, but in a much larger and horrible scale. The US wants to force Ukraine to a capitulation agreement and a fake peace which Russia and Vladimir Putin have no genuine interest to uphold. Vladimir Putin is now being rewarded for violating all the agreements and he promises he made, and after he clearly showed an aversion to complying with the agreements he signed, we are being fed the lie that this time it’s going to be different. Europe is once again making the same mistake of capitulating to Russian blackmail.
Understanding Russia, the belligerents’ perspective, and the nature of this war is essential to understand that ending this war is not a matter of diplomatic negotiations and contractual agreements. Russia is operating on an imperialist and belligerent level. Europe is still operating and relating to Russia from the position of rule-of-law and diplomatic standpoint. These worlds can meet under the failed Metternich tradition of imperialist diplomacy and will always lead to the same results: sovereign states in Europe have lost wars and capitulated many times, but they have never given up their aspirations for independence. Metternich diplomacy will be applied again, and it will fail as it has always did.
Newsroom
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