Angela Merkel and François Hollande’s crime against peace

A few mainstream media colleagues have launched a controversy over an extract from a lecture I gave in Colmar last month [1]. They dispute what I said about the personal responsibility of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President François Hollande for the current war in Ukraine.

Here, in detail, are the facts I have reported and the documents on which I relied, which they deny.

Crimes against peace

On December 28, 2022, President Hollande gave an interview in Paris to Théo Prouvost of the Kyiv Independent [2] , which my opponents have confused with the sketch by Russian comedians Vovan and Lexus that he inspired [3]. In it, he claims to recognize himself in the remarks made a few days earlier by the former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to Zeit [4]. In it, she declared that she had signed the Minsk agreements, not to protect the people of the Donbass and put an end to the war being waged against them by the Kiev authorities, but to give them time to arm themselves. François Hollande explicitly confesses: "Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point. The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a while. What was very important was to know how the West would use this respite to prevent any new Russian attempt".

The "Russian attempt" he refers to is not Moscow sending Russian troops, but the private initiative of billionaire Konstantin Malofeyev to send Cossacks to support the people of the Donbass, as he had done for the Bosnian Serbs.

Angela Merkel’s and François Hollande’s comments were confirmed by the Secretary General of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, who resigned three weeks ago after insulting the Chinese special envoy [5]..

The Minsk agreements were negotiated in two stages:

• The first protocol was signed, on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was also initialed by the governors of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. At the time, these oblasts, though called "republics" like the former Soviet regions, had no ambitions for independence. The protocol instituted a ceasefire, the release of hostages, the withdrawal of troops from both sides, including Konstantin Malofeyev’s Cossacks, and a general amnesty. It also provides for decentralization of powers, local elections and a national dialogue.

Not much happened, however, apart from the withdrawal of Konstantin Malofeyev’s Cossacks at the urging of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who took a dim view of a modern oligarch behaving like a Tsarist-era Grand Duke.

• The second protocol was signed six months later, on February 11, 2015. Negotiations took place under the responsibility of the OSCE, again between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. This time, Germany, France and Russia acted as guarantors ("Normandy format").

It contains more or less the same provisions as the first protocol, but is more detailed. Above all, it states that decentralization, which has not taken place as agreed, will have to be achieved through constitutional reform.

Russia feared that this second protocol would not be applied any more than the first. Vladislav Sourkov, who had been in charge of this dossier at the Kremlin, later explained this and not that it did not want to apply it, as Le Figaro [6] wrongly interpreted it. Moreover, it was Moscow [7], not Berlin or Paris, that submitted the protocol to the Security Council for approval.

Towards a Nuremberg 2 trial

Reacting to Chancellor Merkel’s and President Hollande’s remarks, Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma (i.e. the lower house), immediately intervened to express his indignation at these confessions. Then, after the Christmas holidays, he published his comments on his Telegram channel [8]. This led to two dispatches, one from the Tass agency [9] and another from the Ria-Novosti agency [10], which my opponents also ignore.

In his capacity as Chairman of the State Duma, he first quotes President Vladimir Putin: "If a fight is unavoidable, you must strike first". Then he declares: "The confessions of a representative of the Kiev regime and former German and French leaders should be used as evidence before an international military tribunal. These leaders were plotting to start a World War with predictable consequences. They deserve to be punished for their crimes.

In describing the statements made by Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov as evidence of "crimes", he is referring to the "crimes against peace" enunciated at the Liberation by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. According to this authority, recognized by all UN member states, these are the most serious crimes, even more so than "crimes against humanity". They are therefore not subject to any statute of limitations.

Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov have not yet been the subject of an arrest warrant, but they have already been reported. For the time being, there is no jurisdiction capable of judging their crimes. This is why President Vyacheslav Volodin alluded to the idea of an "international military tribunal" (equivalent to the Nuremberg Tribunal). Such a tribunal has yet to be set up following the war in Ukraine. There is no doubt that, unless France, Germany and Ukraine agree, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov will have to answer for "crimes against Peace".

I can only deplore the fact that my opponents have not found the above-mentioned documents. In reality, this is quite normal: they are only interested in Anglo-Saxon or European press agencies that refuse to take into account the Russian point of view. They take the official narrative at face value and don’t do their due diligence.

Why the Minsk agreements were never implemented

Russia, as I mentioned above, presented the second protocol to the Security Council on February 17, 2015. This was the subject of resolution 2202. In the annex, Moscow had the text of the protocol and the statement by the four heads of state adopted: Vladimir Putin (Russia), Petro Poroshenko (Ukraine), François Hollande (France) and Angela Merkel (Germany). During the debates, Ukraine’s permanent representative in New York expressed his satisfaction at the unwavering support of the United Nations.

In passing, it should be noted that China’s permanent representative made clear at the time the position he still holds today: peace can only be lasting if the concerns of all parties are addressed.

Yet the second Minsk agreement has not been implemented. In the Donbass, sporadic clashes have always taken place, with each side blaming the other. Moreover, Kiev wanted the amnesty to be proclaimed after the local elections, while the leaders of the Donbass Oblates wanted it to be proclaimed beforehand. This would have enabled them to stand in the elections, which they would probably have won. Constitutional amendments were indeed put to the vote on August 31, 2015, at the Verkhovna Rada, in the presence... of the US special envoy, the Straussian Victoria Nuland, who had organized the 2014 coup (known as "EuroMaidan"). Elected representatives of the "integral nationalist" Sloboda party tried to block the vote and invaded the gallery, shouting "Shame!" and "Treason!" [11]. Meanwhile, outside the Assembly, clashes broke out between police and "integral nationalist" militiamen, leaving 4 dead and 122 injured. A qualified majority was not reached in the Rada, and the constitutional reform was not adopted.

These riots were the biggest since the overthrow of the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, by the Sloboda "integral nationalists", supported by Victoria Nuland. President Petro Poroshneko condemned them, but wasn’t told twice. It was clear that if he persisted in implementing the Minsk agreements, he too would be overthrown.

Courageous, but not foolhardy, he suddenly denounced the second Minsk protocol. According to him, former president Leonid Kuchma’s signature on the Ukrainian side was worthless because he had not been accredited by the Verkhovna Rada. Yes, but Petro Poroshenko was present at the negotiations, as acting Ukrainian President, he raised no objections when the agreements were signed, nor when they were ratified by the Security Council, and he signed a joint declaration in which he undertook to implement them. Henceforth, he shared the same bad faith as President François Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

President Petro Poroshenko immediately appointed the Sloboda militia to put pressure on the people of the Donbass. This is the sinister Azov division of the "White Führer", Andriy Biletsky. Over a period of seven years, 80,000 fighters would battle it out. Kiev’s men killed between 17,000 and 21,000 of their own Donbass population. Poroshenko set up an apartheid, a two-tier citizenship: Russian speakers in the Donbass were no longer entitled to any public services, schools or pensions.

The United Nations Security Council did not intervene, at most issuing a presidential statement on June 6, 2018 [12]. Once in power, President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to reconnect the threads by convening a Normandy-format meeting, but to no avail.

The responsibility to protect the people of Donbass

On November 2, 2021, the President appoints Dmytro Yarosh, the leading figure of the "integral nationalists" and a long-time CIA agent [13], as advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. He quickly drew up a plan for an attack on the Donbass [14], to be launched on March 9, 2022.

However, at an impromptu ceremony in the Kremlin on February 21, Moscow suddenly recognized the Donestk and Loughansk People’s Republics as independent states. The following day, it launched a "special military operation". Russian troops converged from both their own border and that of Belarus to prevent any regrouping of Ukrainian forces in the Donbass. It destroyed Kiev’s military airport, but did not seek to take the capital. Within a few weeks, it had liberated most of the Donbass.

For months, Russia avoided uttering the word "war". It explained that it was intervening exclusively to put an end to the suffering of the civilian population of Donbass. On the contrary, the West accused Russia of having "invaded" Ukraine in order to conquer it. However, Russia has merely applied Resolution 2202 and the declaration of the heads of state that negotiated the Minsk agreements. In fact, in order to reserve this possibility, it reproduced it as an annex to the resolution. To say that Russia invaded Ukraine would imply that France "invaded" Rwanda when it put an end to the Tutsi genocide in 1994. No one thinks so. It simply implemented Resolution 929 and saved millions of lives.

Strangely enough, Russia did not raise the "responsibility to protect" argument. This is because it had opposed the formulation of this concept, which was only adopted by the United Nations in 2005. However, she would finally use it, on February 12, 2024, at a meeting of the Security Council that she would convene. She would set out her invariable position, but this time she would use the same diplomatic language as her interlocutors.

War propaganda

As I conclude this article, I’d like to come back to what my colleagues have written. According to them, I have invented the responsibility of François Hollande and Angela Merkel in the current war, and I am relaying Russian disinformation by claiming that Moscow did not invade Ukraine. They probably wrote these articles with the intention of undermining my credibility.

Perhaps they didn’t realize that by writing this nonsense in mainstream media, they were misleading the public and ultimately relaying the propaganda of war supporters.