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Zakharchenko's death and the Normandy process
Summary
A look back at the diplomatic questions raised by the killing of a Donetsk separatist leader, as seen on 6 September 2018.
What did the killing of Alexander Zakharchenko mean for diplomacy over eastern Ukraine on 6 September 2018? Six days after his death, the question was still open, and the answers offered by Moscow were already clear.
Zakharchenko, leader of the terrorist organisation known as the DNR, died on 31 August 2018 in an explosion at a restaurant in central Donetsk. On 2 September, tens of thousands of people attended his funeral. The day before, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had called the murder a provocation and said it would derail the stalled Normandy format peace process.
What the Normandy format was
The Normandy format, also known as the Normandy contact group or Normandy Four, brought 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 played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements between 2014 and 2015. By September 2018, as Lavrov's remarks acknowledged, the process had already stalled. His warning therefore framed the killing as a further obstacle to a track that was not moving.
Other pressure points in the region
The same week brought other regional developments. On 4 September 2018, a chemical release in Armiansk, in Crimea, caused significant environmental contamination. And on 6 September 2018, the president of the unrecognised Republic of Transnistria, Vadim Krasnoselsky, was due to visit Moldovan President Igor Dodon for talks, a visit he had announced on 31 August.
Looking back
The public record from those days shows Moscow moving quickly to define the meaning of the Donetsk blast, casting it as a provocation and tying it to the future of the Normandy talks. Much later, the Normandy format ceased to exist as a functioning channel: the background shows that it operated until 2022, and that meetings in 2022 failed to ease tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In September 2018, that outcome lay ahead; what was visible was a stalled process and a public argument about who was responsible for further damaging it.
