Why the Kremlin Is Shutting Down the Novorossiya Project

Why the Kremlin Is Shutting Down the Novorossiya Project

Posted by: Andrei Kolesnikov Friday, May 29, 2015 | Carnegie Moscow | http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=60249&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonva3NZKXonjHpfsX57uQsW6Sg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YIERMV0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D

On May 20, the leaders of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (LNR and DNR) announced the abandonment of the Novorossiya project, a hypothetical confederation of states in southeastern Ukraine stretching from Kharkiv to Odessa. DNR Foreign Minister Alexander Kofman said that the idea hadn’t attracted enough support outside the separatist territories. Oleg Tsaryov, the speaker of Novorossiya’s “Unitary Parliament” and a frequent guest on Russian television, offered a different explanation: “The work of Novorossiya  [official] structures has been frozen because it does not conform to the [Minsk II] peace agreement signed in the presence of the Normandy Four countries [Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France, on February 12].”

 It is no coincidence that the closure comes just days after Secretary of State John Kerry met with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Sochi, and Assistant  Secretary of State Victoria Nuland met with her counterparts in Moscow, marking the highest-level meetings between U.S. and Russian officials in Russia since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine. Although representatives from the Russian Foreign Ministry insisted that they would not cut a deal with the Americans, the two sides seem to have come to some kind of agreement. http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=60249&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonva3NZKXonjHpfsX57uQsW6Sg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YIERMV0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D