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What did the Paris summit change in Donbas?
Summary
A retrospective on the Normandy Format meeting held in Paris, where Kyiv and Moscow agreed to a ceasefire target.
What did the Paris talks actually deliver? On 10 December 2019, a day after the meeting, the question was how much weight to give the outcome of a summit that brought together the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany.
The meeting took place on 9 December 2019 in the Normandy Format. 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.
A ceasefire deadline
The concrete result was a breakthrough in the talks. Russia and Ukraine agreed to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019, a commitment with a short deadline of about three weeks.
The format behind the meeting
The Normandy Format, made up of Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France, first met informally in 2014 during the 70th anniversary of D-Day celebrations in Normandy. It later played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements between 2014 and 2015. The Paris summit therefore revived a channel with an established track record in mediation.
What the meeting signalled
Two things stood out on 9 December 2019: the personal encounter between the two presidents for the first time, and a dated promise on the ceasefire. Whether the promise would be kept was the open question. The same channel, the background shows, continued to meet until 2022, when later meetings failed to ease rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
