Home › World › What the Paris summit promised on Donbass
What the Paris summit promised on Donbass
Summary
A look back at the Normandy Format meeting held in Paris days before 11 December 2019, and the ceasefire pledge it produced.
What had the Paris peace talks actually delivered by 11 December 2019? Two days earlier, on 9 December, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel met in the French capital for talks on ending the war in Donbass.
The meeting carried weight in its own right. It was the first time Putin and Zelensky had met, and the first four-way leaders' meeting of this kind since 2016.
The ceasefire pledge
The concrete result was a commitment. Following what was reported as a breakthrough in the talks, Russia and Ukraine agreed to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019. That gave the pledge a deadline of only a few weeks.
The format behind the meeting
The four countries around the table, Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France, made up the Normandy Format. The group first met informally in 2014, during the 70th anniversary of the D-Day celebrations in Normandy, and it later played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements between 2014 and 2015.
The Paris summit was therefore a return to a familiar framework, now with a new Ukrainian leader and Putin sitting across from each other for the first time.
What remained to be seen
On 11 December 2019 the ceasefire was a promise, not yet a fact. Whether it would be implemented by the end of the year was the measure by which the Paris meeting would be judged. Later, the format's meetings in 2022 failed to de-escalate rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
