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Paris talks and Sheremet arrests: 12 December 2019
Summary
A look back at the day Ukraine named suspects in a high-profile journalist killing, three days after a Normandy Format summit in Paris.
What did Ukraine's news look like on 12 December 2019? It combined a diplomatic aftermath with a major development in a criminal case that had drawn wide attention.
On that date, the main suspects in the killing of the journalist Pavlo Sheremet were arrested. They were three Ukrainian military personnel: Yana Duhar, Yulia Kuzmenko and Andriy Antonenko. The case had been described as high-profile, and the arrests marked a significant step in it.
The Paris summit three days earlier
The arrests came shortly after leaders met in Paris on 9 December 2019 for Ukraine peace talks. Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel took part. It was the first meeting between Putin and Zelensky, and the first four-way leaders' meeting of this kind since 2016.
Following a breakthrough in the talks, Russia and Ukraine agreed to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019.
The format of the meeting, known as the Normandy Format, brought together Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. The group first met informally in 2014 during the 70th anniversary of D-Day celebrations in Normandy, and it played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015. Later, in 2022, further meetings failed to defuse rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Two stories, one week
Taken together, the dates show a week in which Kyiv's attention was divided between the diplomacy over the Donbass and a criminal case involving a journalist. The ceasefire pledge set a deadline of the end of 2019, while the arrests on 12 December 2019 put three named suspects at the centre of the Sheremet investigation.
