Recently, the US and and French authorities have pointed to the 2015 Minsk Agreement between Kyiv and Moscow as the blueprint for a breakthrough in the Ukraine crisis.
- Minsk Agreements were signed in 2014 and 201 in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
Minsk Agreement-1 (2014)
- Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists agreed a 12-point ceasefire deal in Minsk in September 2014.
- Its provisions included prisoner exchanges, deliveries of humanitarian aid and the withdrawal of heavy weapons, five months into a conflict that had by then killed more than 2,600 people – a toll that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says has since risen to around 15,000.
MINSK II (2015)
- In MINSK II, brokered by France and Germany, world leaders again sought to halt the conflict that began when Russia-backed separatists seized swaths of territory following Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
- Representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the leaders of two pro-Russian separatist regions signed a 13-point agreement in February 2015.
- Point 10, for example, calls for the withdrawal of all foreign armed formations and military equipment from the two disputed regions, Donetsk and Luhansk: Ukraine says this refers to forces from Russia, but Moscow denies it has any forces there.
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