Russian- Ukrainian peace deal known as the Minsk agreement was a ploy, said former German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was the mediator together with France ex-president Francois Hollande in mentioned agreement. The deal had two parts, the Minsk protocol signed in 2014 by Ukraine, Russia, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe {OSCE} to end the military conflict between the Armed forces in Ukraine and the Pro-Russian armed group in Donbas; and in 2015 Minsk II, with the same signatories, because the Minsk protocol failed and fights continued.
Photo source: nytimes.com
In Wednesday’s interview for the German magazine ZEIT, Angela Merkel argued, that the Minsk agreement was an “attempt to give Ukraine time.” France and Germany had brokered a ceasefire after the failure of Ukraine’s attempt to subdue the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk by force.
Angela Merkel said: “[Ukraine] used this time to get stronger, as you can see today,” She continued. “The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltsevo in early 2015, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”
Her words confirmed Pyotr Poroshenko’s, who became president of Ukraine after the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev, told a domestic audience in August 2015 that Minsk was a ruse to buy time for a military build-up. He admitted as much to the West in July 2022, in an interview with German media.
Western countries were deeply involved in this military build-up in Ukraine. They created the Multinational Joint Commission [MJC} composed of the US, Canada, UK, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, and Denmark. MJC was seeded by former prime minister Stephen Harper. Harper offered $5 million to the Ukraine state to retrain Ukrainian police forces. The MJC was granted by Harper the cooperation of the RCMP in order to create the National Police of Ukraine, which was established on 7 November 2015 and intends to hire 130,000 Ukrainians. The project was extended under Operation UNIFIER to reform the Ukrainian military. The Canadian contribution of training was provided by about 200 Canadian soldiers, rotating every six months, which increased to 260 in January 2022. As of today, there had been 230-course sessions and more than 33,000 Ukrainian soldiers trained under Operation UNIFIER.
Canada also has contributed with military equipment and with millions of dollars in financial support.
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/campaigns/canadian-military-support-to-ukraine.html
After the Minsk agreement failed and Western countries ignored Russian requests for security demands, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a special military operation in Ukraine, which started on February 24, 2022, when the Russian military crossed the borders with Ukraine, to protect Russian citizens living in Donbas and Donetsk republic. By the statistics, the local conflict between the Armed forces in Ukraine and the Pro-Russian armed group in Donbas and Donetsk cost over 12,000 human lives from 2015- 2021.
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