"Good morning, everyone.
It’s nice to have such a great crowd to focus on Ukraine. Actually, yesterday we had a very sad anniversary, the second anniversary of the forced occupation of the Crimea and after two years, the Russian goal remained completely the same. This goal is to kill off any possibility for united democratic and European Ukraine to success.
Of course we can discuss geopolitics.
I personally believe that Russia has been trading with security like commodity on the stock exchange, creating instabilities here and there, trying to buy and sell the stability. But the point about Ukraine is not just about geopolitics. It's about us, Ukrainians. It's about Ukrainian people.
And my personal choice is to live in a free democratic and European Ukraine. I don't want to live in an unfree country, like Russia for example.
And it's the same choice for Ukrainians, for the absolute majority of Ukrainians. Because of that we've been fighting all these three years against Russian aggression.
The whole idea about what was going on in Donbas is about trying to establish a mafia-style enclave by Russia and to push it back into Ukraine as a sort of Trojan horse to destabilize Ukraine internally.
So the idea about Minsk agreements is simple, and for me it is very easy to implement. If you would like this, what should you do?
You stop selling.
You let the OSCE to control what is going on on the ground.
You disengage forces.
You let the OSCE to monitor the Russian- Ukrainian border.
And we've been having continuous inflow of everything into Ukraine. Imagine, we have any kind of sophisticated weapons including anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons.
We have continuous inflow of mercenaries, ammunitions and Russian regular troops, thousands of regular troops.
It's not about 200 to 500 people.
There are Russian regular officers in every military unit there, because otherwise the whole system couldn't be guided. And the idea is to try to exhaust Ukrainian resources. Now we have to allocate five percent of our GDP to security and defense staying on the IMF program.
Why?
Because of the occupation of Crimea and Donbas we lost 20 percent of our industrial output.
But we still have to allocate this five percent of GDP.
And we will keep doing so, because after two years we have a real army.
We have our military forces able and capable to defend Ukraine.
And the idea of Minsk is to go through security, through the gateway of elections, maybe not ideal elections, but still free and fair elections under international control to the OSCE standards.
Russia kept saying for a year there were no OSCE standards, so I showed the Russian leadership the famous decision of the OSCE Copenhagen summit, 1990. What are the OSCE standards? It's to let political parties participate in free elections.
Seems fair. To let the media to participate in the pre-electoral and electoral process. To let the internally displaced people, though I hate this bit of terminology, to participate in the elections.
We have, just imagine in Ukraine, in the center of Europe, 1.5 million internally displaced people, and they also have the right to define the fate of Donbas.
But it's not only about Donbas.
If you have political will to sort out the situation in Donbas, it could be done in months. Security, free and fair elections and renovation of Donbas.
But the idea to destabilize Donbas and so to destabilize Ukraine is there on top of the Russian agenda, because the Russian leadership wants us to push from the European cause and to create a weak and fragmented Ukraine.
We would be easier to deal with and to present Ukraine as a failed state.
No way. From the 1 of January we have our free trade area with the European Union. And we got from Russia our punishment for that.
Again imagine,just three years ago our economic turnout with Russia was 37 percent, last year - 11.
For the country with 45 million people, this year it could be 4 or 5 percent.
It's practically negligible. Russia introduced embargos, any kind of prohibition of transit.
Now we are not buying any Russian gas for the first time actually, last year and this year. So we are in a completely different environment.
But in the sense of commitment of the Ukrainian people, there will be no stop in trying to build up Ukraine how we understand it, and we understand our Ukraine as united, democratic and European country which could be the horror scenario for Russia.
But generally it's about us, Ukrainians, to define what we could do and what we should do in the future, of how to build our country, or in the sense of our foreign policy.
And there could be no deals in this sense".

Credits: GMF

Watch the video of panel discussion:
http://brussels.gmfus.org/videos/brussels-forum-2016-russia-ukraine-and-future-europe