The Minsk Agreements enable Ukraine to demand peace from Russia with clear criteria and conditions, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the leader of the European Solidarity faction, said in an article published by the online publication Ukrainska Pravda on Wednesday.

"Even today, the Minsk Agreements provide a chance for formulating tough requirements to be met by Russia, for demanding and not begging peace from it. It only takes political will. A roadmap with a clear sequence of steps, the return to the idea of UN peacekeepers, which we thoroughly elaborated on, the absence of any haste in preparing elections in the occupied territories (holding them this coming fall is simply out of the question), not entreaties but pressure on Putin - all of this is possible and essential based on the Minsk Agreements that were drawn up from September 2014 to February 2015," Poroshenko said in his article.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's team came to power by criticizing the Minsk Agreements, it has still not proposed any alternatives to guarantee peace in Donbas, Poroshenko said.

"It's been almost a year since rampant critics of the Minsk Agreements came into power. It turns out the doves of peace have nothing in their beaks, that is, no peace plan of their own. Moreover, in Paris [during the recent Normandy-format summit], Volodymyr Zelensky added his signature to the package of documents that are conventionally called Minsk (and he can now keep me company in being questioned at the State Bureau of Investigations, which is digging into Minsk)," he said.

Poroshenko said he has never idealized the Minsk Agreements and would not wish anyone to find themselves in the circumstances that existed before the negotiations in February 2015.

"Having no resources to overcome Russia in military terms, we then played it out diplomatically and thus salvaged Ukraine," he said.