Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov believes that President Pyotr Poroshenko of Ukraine wants to bury the accords on peace settlement in eastern Ukraine.
“On the Minsk agreements, I believe that the Ukrainian government and President Poroshenko personally want them dead,” Lavrov said in an interview with the National Interest magazine.
“They want them dead in a way which would allow them to blame Russia and the people in the east of Ukraine,” he said. “They certainly encountered huge opposition from the radicals, and the radicals believe that this government is weak enough just to wait it out and to have either early elections or to have another Maidan.”
“The Ukrainian government wants to provoke the other side to blink first and to say, enough is enough, we drop from the Minsk deal,” Lavrov said. “That’s why the economic blockade, that’s why the prohibition for the banks to serve the population in the east.”
“By the way, in the Minsk agreements, two years ago we discussed the difficulties in banking services for this part of Ukraine and Germany and France committed themselves to organizing mobile banking, and they failed because they could never get cooperation from the Ukrainian authorities,” he said.