Attempts to impose on Moscow the obligations of the parties to the conflict in the Donbass are absurd
Moscow. July 20. INTERFAX-Moscow is providing humanitarian assistance to the Donbas, OSCE observers could not find evidence of the Russian military presence in the region, Deputy head of the presidential administration of the Russian Federation Dmitry Kozak said in an interview with the French publication Politique Internationale.
"The absence of a Russian military presence was confirmed by the leadership of the OSCE special monitoring mission. Back in 2019, at a meeting of the UN Security Council, the head of the mission, E. Apakan, officially stated that the presence of the armed forces of the Russian Federation in the Donbas was not detected," Kozak said.
According to him, the inevitability of a humanitarian catastrophe in the region was obvious. "The Russian Federation provides economic and humanitarian support to the residents of Donbass. He does it openly, without hiding anything. In the conditions of a total economic blockade of Donbass by Ukraine, without Russian support, the residents of these territories would be deprived of minimal means of subsistence and basic life support services," he said.
Kozak said that " the demagogy itself that the separatists are allegedly our puppets has only one goal: to cast doubt on the agreements signed in Minsk in order to hold the idea of the possibility of a non-political settlement of the conflict, its resolution by military means or by economic strangulation of one of the parties."
"If we are guided by pragmatic considerations, it is necessary to proceed from the fact that the discussions on the causes, parties to the conflict and the forces behind them ended in 2015 with the signing of the Minsk agreements. All practical actions to resolve the conflict should be carried out in the paradigm of these agreements. Any attempts to return to the period before reaching political agreements will always remove us from the desired goal," he said.