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What Zakharchenko's funeral signalled for peace talks
Summary
A look back at the burial of the Donetsk separatist leader and Moscow's warning about the stalled Normandy process.
What did the funeral of Alexander Zakharchenko tell observers about the prospects for peace in Donbas? On 2 September 2018, tens of thousands of people attended the burial of the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, who had been killed two days earlier.
The killing
On 31 August 2018, Zakharchenko died in a blast at a café in the centre of Donetsk. Ukrainian-language reports of the day described him as the leader of the DNR, a terrorist organisation.
Moscow's reading
By 1 September, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had called the murder a provocation. He said it would derail the Normandy format peace process, which was already stalled, according to reports at the time.
The Normandy format brought together Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. It first met informally in 2014, during the 70th anniversary of the D-Day celebrations in Normandy, and played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015. Lavrov's warning therefore concerned the main diplomatic channel between the parties to the war in Donbas.
What the day showed
The size of the funeral crowd showed that the killing had become a major public event in Donetsk. Together with Lavrov's statement, it put pressure on a negotiating track that had, by his own account, already stopped moving. What the reports of 2 September 2018 do not show is who carried out the attack, and this analysis does not speculate on it.
A regional footnote
Elsewhere in the region, on 31 August 2018, the president of the unrecognised Transnistrian republic, Vadim Krasnoselsky, announced a visit to Moldovan President Igor Dodon for talks on 6 September. It was a separate matter, but a reminder that contacts between Moldova and its breakaway territory continued while attention was fixed on Donetsk.
The funeral marked the moment when a killing in Donetsk was linked, by Russia's foreign minister, to the fate of the diplomatic format meant to end the war.
