What the Paris Normandy summit left behind by 13 December 2019
Four days after the Paris talks, a look at what the Normandy Format meeting had produced and what it signalled.
What was left of the Paris summit by 13 December 2019, four days after it took place? The meeting on 9 December brought together Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel for talks on ending the war in Donbass.
What was agreed
The concrete outcome was a commitment. Russia and Ukraine agreed, following what was described as a breakthrough in the talks, to implement a ceasefire in the Donbass by the end of 2019. That left roughly three weeks for the pledge to take effect.
Why the format mattered
The meeting was the first time Putin and Zelensky had met, and the first four-way leaders' meeting of this kind since 2016. The grouping, known as the Normandy Format, brought together Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. As the background to the format shows, it first met informally in 2014 during the D-Day anniversary celebrations in Normandy, and later played a substantial role in mediating the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015.
Implications
The summit therefore restored a high-level channel that had been dormant for three years, and attached a specific deadline to it. Whether a ceasefire would hold by the end of the year was the measure by which the Paris meeting could be judged. Later, the format's further meetings in 2022 failed to de-escalate rising tensions before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but nothing of that was known on 13 December 2019, when the focus was on the year-end ceasefire commitment.
