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After the Paris summit: what the Normandy Four agreed
Summary
A look back at the diplomacy that framed Ukraine's mid-December 2019, from a Paris meeting to a cultural listing.
What did Ukraine's diplomacy look like on 15 December 2019, six days after leaders met in Paris? The summit was still the main reference point for the war in Donbass.
On 9 December 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel met in the French capital for Ukraine peace talks. It was the first time Putin and Zelensky had met, and the first four-way leaders' meeting of this kind since 2016.
A ceasefire pledge
Following a breakthrough in the talks, Russia and Ukraine agreed to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019. That left roughly three weeks between the Paris meeting and the self-imposed deadline.
The format that brought the four leaders together is known as the Normandy Format, or Normandy Four. Its members were Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. They first met informally in 2014, during the 70th anniversary of the D-Day celebrations in Normandy, and the group later played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements between 2014 and 2015.
A different kind of news
Not all of that week's Ukraine headlines concerned the front line. On 13 December 2019, Kosiv painted ceramics were added to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The listing gave Ukraine a cultural milestone alongside its diplomatic activity.
By 15 December, then, the ceasefire commitment made in Paris stood as the central pledge, with the end-of-year target ahead. The format that produced it would continue to meet in the years that followed, although, as the group's later history shows, its meetings in 2022 failed to deescalate rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
