Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavlo Klimkin believes that the leader of the "DPR" Oleksandr Zakharchenko made the statement about the creation of "Malorossiya" at the behest of the Kremlin. "Even when the delegation of Ukraine is on visit to Georgia, the Kremlin is trying to play the Abkhaz scenario in Donbas. We and our partners will not let it going to happen. The Kremlin masters with their Donbas puppets staged another show by pulling Malorossiya out of mothballs," Klimkin wrote on Twitter on 18 July.
Earlier in the day, Zakharchenko in Donetsk said that the "DPR" and "LPR" create a new state instead of Ukraine. He alleged that, in addition to members of these terrorist organizations, representatives of 19 regions of Ukraine took part in the ceremony of reading out the "constitutional act of the new state".
He said the capital of "Malorossiya" will be Donetsk while Kyiv shall "remain a historical and cultural center without the status of a capital city."
Later on "LPR" denied the participation in creation of "the state of Malorossiya".
The representative of Ukraine in the subgroup on security of the Tripartite Contact Group, Yevhen Marchuk, stated the belief that Zakharchenko's statement can paralyze the negotiations in Minsk.