What is the Normandy format?
The Normandy format is an informal forum that was set up by French, German, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats in 2014, after Russia kickstarted a separatist conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. It takes its name from the Normandy landings in the second world war. The first meeting took place in Normandy on the margins of the ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the allied landings.
What has the format achieved?
Not much. The Minsk protocol – a 2014 agreement reached in the Belarusian capital that sought to end the war in Ukraine – was mediated by France and Germany under the Normandy format. But it failed to stop the fighting, and a new package of measures – known as Minsk II – was signed in February 2015, after a fraught 16 hours of negotiations. This also did not end the fighting, though the Normandy format parties agreed that it was the basis for any future resolution to the conflict. Russia’s insistence that it is not a party to the conflict, and therefore is not bound by the terms of the Minsk agreements, has impeded progress.
What was the gist of the Minsk protocols?
The protocols were seen as complicated and fragile attempts to bring peace to eastern Ukraine, but at their heart they tried to reconcile Ukraine’s demand for full sovereignty over its territory with Russia’s insistence that the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine required autonomy. They called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the battle zone, amnesties on both sides and exchanges of prisoners and hostages.
What was done to end the impasse?
Two schemes – the Morel plan and the Steinmeier formula – were floated in 2015 and 2016. Both proposed a “special status” law for the Donbas region that would come into force on the day of elections, if they were deemed free and fair by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Neither proposal was accepted by Kyiv, since Russian troops would remain during the elections.
What happened in 2019?
After a three-year pause, leaders of the Normandy format met in Paris in December 2019. It was the first meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who had been elected as president of Ukraine in a landslide victory in April. Zelenskiy had made ending the war one of his campaign promises.
Tentative agreements on prisoner exchanges and a total ceasefire were reached, but there was no political breakthrough to the now five-year-old conflict. The outcome was described as a draw.
Why aren’t the UK and US involved?
In his autobiography, David Cameron admitted it looked as if the UK had been carved out of the diplomatic effort in 2014, but maintained that he and Barack Obama did not want to grant Putin a large-scale meeting that could overshadow the commemorations of the liberation of France. “I was quite happy for the UK and the US to watch from a distance,” he wrote. Others, including his deputy, Nick Clegg, said it was a big strategic mistake for which the UK has since paid.