Journalists asked Kozak if he was satisfied with the results of the talks between Putin and Biden on the topic of Ukraine.
“It seems so,” Kozak replied, adding that “there is hope” that “something will get off the ground.”
According to him, Putin and Biden discussed the issue of Ukraine “in some detail”, in particular, the key terms of the Minsk agreements. They, as Kozak noted, presuppose, first of all, “a political dialogue, the development of mutually acceptable political conditions” for the future status of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions occupied by the Russian Federation within Ukraine.
The deputy head of the Putin administration stressed that at the summit of the two presidents, not mechanisms for resolving the conflict in Donbass were discussed, but only the positions of the parties.
Immediately after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia launched an armed aggression in eastern Ukraine. The fighting is between the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the one hand and the Russian army and Russian-backed militants who control parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on the other. Officially, the Russian Federation does not recognize its invasion of Ukraine, despite the facts and evidence presented by Ukraine. According to UN data as of February 10, 2021, during the conflict about 13 thousand people died.
Negotiations on the settlement of the conflict in Donbass are being held within the framework of the trilateral contact group (TCG, Ukraine-OSCE-Russia) and the Normandy Four (Ukraine-Germany-France-Russia).
February 12, 2015 in Minsk the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany Petro Poroshenko, Vladimir Putin, Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel during 17-hour talks agreed on two documents on the settlement of the conflict in Donbass: a declaration on the implementation of the Minsk agreements and a set of measures for the implementation of the Minsk agreements. They provided for the cessation of hostilities in the Donbass, the withdrawal of illegal armed groups from the region, the creation of conditions for holding elections to local authorities, etc. So far, the Minsk agreements have not been implemented.
According to the head of the Ukrainian delegation to the TCG Leonid Kravchuk, the negotiation process to resolve the situation in Donbass does not give real results neither in the Minsk format, nor in the Norman format. He expressed the opinion that the negotiation process on Donbass the summit will affect Biden and Putin.
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