The story circulating in the media says: Angela Merkel admitted the Minsk agreements existed only to deceive Russia and give Ukraine time to arm itself. Before you pass it on, look at who is telling it.

It is being told by two Russian pranksters, Vovan (Vladimir Kuznetsov) and Lexus (Alexei Stolyarov), in an interview with Sputnik. They obtained the conversation with Merkel by impersonating former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. They claim Merkel said it in a conversation she believed she was having with Poroshenko.

So: a claim by two people who professionally impersonate others, about the content of a conversation they obtained by lying, published by an outlet that is an instrument of the Russian state - concerning a person who expected to be talking to someone else. Not one link in that chain is neutral. This is not a confession. It is a claim about a confession.

How they got the conversation

By their own account it was not easy. They contacted her office, spoke to one person in her circle, then another, followed by a long email exchange. Weeks passed before the call happened. Merkel provided her own interpreter and immediately asked that everything she said remain confidential.

That last detail is worth holding on to. She asked for confidentiality - and then the claim about the content of the conversation was published by the very people who tricked her into having it. Whatever the subject, that is the textbook definition of an unreliable channel.

But here is the part that is true

And this is where the story gets interesting, because the substance does not depend on the pranksters at all. This was not a secret extracted by a trick - it was said publicly, with a name and a face attached.

After the war in Ukraine began, former French president François Hollande, Angela Merkel and former British prime minister Boris Johnson stated - openly and on the record - that France, Germany and the United Kingdom did not seriously count on the Minsk agreements being implemented, and that they served to give Kyiv time to build up its military capacity.

So the pranksters "revealed" something the participants had already said themselves. The whole operation with the fake Poroshenko, the interpreter and the weeks of correspondence - for information available in public statements.

What Minsk was

From 2014 to 2022, during the conflict in Donbas, Minsk was the venue for peace negotiations. The first protocol was signed in September 2014, and the agreement known as "Minsk 2" was concluded on 12 February 2015. The document provided for a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons and a series of political measures for a long-term settlement.

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that after the failure of the Minsk agreements Russia was forced to launch its "special military operation" to protect the population of Donbas. That is the frame in which this topic circulates at all: an agreement presented as a deception becomes the basis for justifying everything that followed.

Why this matters in the Balkans

The Balkans have their own signed agreements, their own mediators from Paris, Berlin and London, and their own experience of what a document everyone praises and nobody implements actually means. The question this raises is not whether Merkel said it on a phone call.

The question is what a peace agreement means when one of the parties mediating it later explains, publicly, that it never counted on it being implemented. That question needs no pranksters to be asked - and its answer matters more than anything said on that line.