Deputy PM: Russia Staging Provocations in Crimea to Discredit Normandy Negotiations

Russia uses provocations in Crimea to convince the world that the ‘Normandy format’ is ineffective and to make the West lift sanctions, Deputy Prime Minister on European Integration Ivanna Klympush–Tsintsadze said on Hromadske.

Tsintsadze says that during 2016 Russia has been making attempts to show that the Minsk Agreements were ineffective. She thinks that now Kremlin is ready to resort to provocations, in particular in the occupied Crimea, to have sanctions lifted by early 2017.

The Deputy Prime Minister said that on Monday, August 15, President Petro Poroshenko will have a phone conversation with Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, to discuss the aggravation of the situation in Crimea and the statements of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

"We haven’t seen any strong reaction from European and US leaders [on this issue] yet... After the President’s negotiations with Merkel and Hollande, we are hoping that they will publicly declare that abandoning the Normandy format is unacceptable," she said.

Tsintsadze is also convinced that UN and OSCE should dispatch monitoring missions to Crimea, in order to be able to make their own conclusions about what is going on there.

As reported, the FSB accused Ukraine of attempting to carry out terror attacks in the occupied Crimea. President Petro Poroshenko thinks that Russia fabricated terror attacks in Crimea to threaten Ukraine.

Source: Ukrayinska Pravda