Home › World › What the Paris summit left on the table
What the Paris summit left on the table
Summary
A look back at the Normandy Format talks that brought Putin and Zelensky together and produced a pledge on a Donbass ceasefire.
What did the Paris talks actually deliver? By 12 December 2019, three days after the summit, the question was how much weight a pledge to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019 could carry.
On 9 December 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel met in Paris 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.
The format behind the meeting
The Normandy Format groups Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. The four first met informally in 2014, during the 70th anniversary of the D-Day celebrations in Normandy, France. The group later had a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements between 2014 and 2015. The Paris meeting therefore revived a channel with an established place in efforts to resolve the war in Donbass.
The ceasefire commitment
The concrete outcome was the agreement, reached after a breakthrough in talks, that Russia and Ukraine would implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019. The deadline was short: only weeks separated the summit from the date set.
What the summit signified
Two points stand out. The first was personal: the two presidents sat down together for the first time. The second was institutional: the leaders' level of the Normandy Format was convened again after a gap dating back to 2016. Whether the pledge would hold was untested on 12 December 2019, and the deadline was still ahead.
Later, the Normandy Format continued to meet until 2022, but further meetings that year failed to deescalate rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
