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What the Paris Normandy summit produced on 9 December
Summary
A look back at the Paris meeting of four leaders and the ceasefire pledge that came out of it.
What did the Paris talks actually deliver? The question was live on 10 December 2019, the day after the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany met in the French capital for peace talks on the war in Donbass.
On 9 December 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel sat down together in Paris. It was the first time Putin and Zelensky had met, and the first four-way leaders' meeting of this kind since 2016.
The meeting followed a breakthrough in talks. Russia and Ukraine agreed to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019.
The format behind the meeting
The grouping is known as the Normandy Format, and it brings together Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. The four first met informally in 2014, during the 70th anniversary of the D-Day celebrations in Normandy. The group later played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements between 2014 and 2015.
The Paris summit therefore revived a channel that had already shaped earlier attempts to settle the conflict. The ceasefire pledge gave it a concrete deadline of the end of 2019.
Later, in 2022, further meetings in the format failed to deescalate rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That outcome lay well beyond the horizon of the Paris talks, which ended with an agreed date for a truce in Donbass.
