KYIV. April 6 (Interfax) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believes the protocol of the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) meeting in Minsk on March 11 is purely declarative, cannot be treated as an international treaty with all the ensuing consequences, and does not legitimize the certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (so-called ORDLO) as legal entities.
"The participants in the TCG meeting in Minsk on March 11, 2020 signed a working document, a protocol, which is declarative in nature and does not envision legal consequences (does not impose any obligations on the parties); in particular, it does not legitimize the ORDLO as a legal entity in any way," Zelensky said in reply to a petition published on his official website on March 16, demanding that Ukraine's representative in the TCG Leonid Kuchma and chief of the Ukrainian presidential office Andriy Yermak retract their signatures on the protocol.
The protocol is not an international treaty, and therefore Ukrainian law does not authorize the president either to sign a working document of the TCG meeting in Minsk on March 11, 2020 or to order that any signatures on it be retracted, Zelensky said.
As was reported, chief of the Ukrainian presidential office Andriy Yermak and deputy head of the Russian Presidential Executive Office Dmitry Kozak attended that meeting.
Kyiv reported that the parties reached agreement on an exchange of prisoners, disengagement, the opening of checkpoints simultaneously in Zolote and Shchastya, and the institution of the Consultative Council.
The TCG decided to institute the Consultative Council within the TCG's political subgroup. The decision was formalized following consultations with representatives of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, France, and Germany on the implementation of agreements reached at the Normandy-format summit in Paris on December 9, 2019.
The agreement on the Consultative Council drew harsh criticism from the Ukrainian opposition, which argued that Kyiv was being forced to engage in direct negotiations with the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics, so effectively legitimizing them as legal entities.