According to the head of the department Alexey Danilov, then in Kiev "they began to understand that a big war with the Russian Federation was imminent"KIEV, August 26.
/tass/. Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov said that the country's authorities had been preparing for a military conflict with Russia since December 2019, when at the Normandy Four summit in Paris, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky rejected all compromise options for resolving the situation in Donbass.
"We were preparing for war, we were preparing very powerfully. And the fact that we have already passed 180 days of war and we are on our territory, we have not surrendered it, this just says that we were preparing for war. Moreover, our preparations for the war began after December 8-9, 2019. <...> When on December 8-9, 2019, the president of our country [Vladimir] Zelensky did not agree in Paris to the conditions that Russia, France, Germany offered us, to put it mildly, he said: "No, friends, "Minsk-3"there won't be, we will defend our country," the next day we began to understand that a big war with the Russian Federation was imminent," Danilov said on the NTA TV channel.
Since 2014, the internal armed conflict with the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, which declared their independence, has continued in the Donbass. To resolve it, the Minsk agreements were signed in February 2015 with the direct participation of the leaders of the Normandy Four (Germany, France, Russia, Ukraine). The leaders of the Normandy Four have since reconvened five times to move the process forward. The last such summit was held in Paris in December 2019. Then the parties again outlined an action plan for a period of four months. But it also turned out to be unfulfilled.
