Minsk II

And then came the Minsk agreement.

And the Minsk II agreement was backed by the U.N. Security Council.

And what did Ukraine and the United States decide behind the scenes? We don't like that agreement.

That was a gunpoint.

And then as soon as he got in there, the Nazis started holding these rallies called No to Capitulation.

And the German foreign minister, Steinmeier, had proposed a new formula for implementing the Minsk II agreement so that they could try to bring the fighting to an end.

And the Nazis look at it like this.

They say that... um everyone who died in the war so far is a hero and that's great but if you make a deal with vladimir putin now then you're selling them all out then they all died in vain and you're getting a bullet in the head and they've made that clear and so You know, I was joking a few years ago.

What? Went another way with the West's assistance, of course, you know, and that's always a bitch.

Minsk II, we went through the Security Council Resolution 2202, which is very strongly, in my view, in favor of Lavrov and what that meant on Lavrov's

point

of the political settlement on Donbass's special status that they created in 2022.

with the unanimous political authority of the Security Council.

So what it does mean is that Lavrov's formulation, that Article 25 means everybody was legally obligated to execute every aspect of Minsk, Minsk II in this case, deserves more careful parsing.

And then comes the sequence which, you know, what he said.

Minsk didn't simply say...

We talked about the Russian language and the Russian-speaking Ukrainian people that are disenfranchised, the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration that they rely upon from the General Assembly resolution, The Kosovo versus Crimea comparisons, which we want to make sure that people understand.

The February 21, the Yanukovych things, the agreement that lasted a day that we talked about.

Minsk II and the Security Council Resolution 2202, the important documentation of that in the UN Security Council.

Merkel's admission that, you know, that, geez, we only put that together so that Ukraine would have more time to arm itself against a greater power, Russia, with our help.

There were two new entities in two thousand and fifteen where the separatists, the ethnically Russian people, had created two republics.

And in two thousand and fifteen, there had already been the Minsk II peace agreement.

So I knew that I couldn't go there from the Kiev side.

I had to go through Russian side, and it was easy to enter over the border into this new entity.

Uh, and there's, uh, some great documentaries about that.

Um, um, and I think in-- You had Minsk 1 in September '14 and Minsk 2, and these are agreements where basically we're trying to broker ceasefires in this region, um, uh, that froze the war but never resolved anything.

Um, you know, and so again, a- as you just use a little bit of deductive reasoning, um, starting back in the early 19s with nuclear proliferation worries and the concerns, and then as, you know, America gained its stride and its dominance internationally, you start to have the expansion of NATO in, in '99, '04, uh, all the way up to, you know, the, the most recent, um, where the, the most recent conflict or war began, uh, in, in the fall or the winter of two thousand and twenty-one.

Now, one of the interesting states, you know, the, the things that took place is, you know, there was an agreement of, uh, potential agreement between Zelensky and Putin.

possibly be forced into a temporary ceasefire, a ceasefire that you rightly say he will violate later.

Like he did violate the other two ceasefires that were signed with him, the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements back in 2014 and 2015.

But in any of these agreements, if you look at the Russian demands, it's not just about land.

What they want is to limit the ability of the Ukrainian state to defend itself.

Frontline's piece emphasizes Russian grievances over NATO expansion and the 2014 Maidan.

Hollande and Merkel publicly acknowledged that Minsk II was intended to buy time to arm Ukraine.

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, said the March 2022 Istanbul talks produced significant concessions from both sides, but Western powers blocked the emerging agreement, choosing to keep striking Putin instead.

That's a claim that