How not to end a war: the three lessons we have taken from the last agreement signed by Russia and Ukraine

On Tuesday and accepted by Ukraine is part of a plan “to end this conflict in a lasting and sustainable way,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

It is a promise that implies a series of risks for Ukraine. The last time he signed a peace agreement with Russia ten years ago, the result was sporadic violence, growing distrust and, finally, a large -scale war.

“I told President Trump this,” said Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an interview last month to CNN, CNN branch. “If Putin can end the war, that’s great. But they have to know that he can make a girlfriend. He deceived me that way. After Minsk’s ceasefire. ”

Minsk’s agreements – the first signed in September 2014 and, when he failed, a second, known as Minsk II, signed only five months later – were designed to end a bloody conflict between Kiev’s forces and Russia -backed separatists in Donctsk and Lugansk in the Donbass region in East Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko, were the signatories, along with OSCE.

The agreements have never been fully implemented and violence has temporarily decreased in the seven years that followed.

Now, while Ukraine and their allies try to forge a new path to peace, experts warn that Minsk’s faults serve as a warning to today’s risks of repetition of history. Here’s what we have learned since then:

1. The military reinforcement of Ukraine is fundamental

In 2015, western military aid to Ukraine was minimal and, mostly, limited to non -lethal supplies, although Obama administration provided military defense equipment. “The crisis cannot be resolved by military means,” argued the then German chancellor Angela Merkel, in a speech given at the 2015 Munich Security Conference, which coincided with the talks about Minsk II. Angela Merkel’s assessment of diplomatic efforts was straightforward: “It is not clear if they will be successful.”

It did not help the fact that both Minsk agreements were signed shortly after, or during, great military defeats to Ukraine.

The first agreement was followed by what is believed to be the deadliest episode of the conflict at Donbass in Ilovaisk. In late August 2014, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were killed while trying to escape the city to avoid the siege.

Six months later, Minsk II was signed while fierce fighting in another city of Donetsk, Debaltseve. This battle was extended for several days beyond the initial term of the ceasefire.

Marie Dumoulin, a diplomat of the France embassy in Berlin at the time, understands that these defeats placed Ukraine and her allies in a disadvantage position in the conversations.

“Basically, the main goal for both France and Germany, but also for Ukrainians, was to end the fighting,” he told CNN. But, he added, “Russia, through its representatives, but also directly, was in a much stronger position on the battlefield and could therefore increase the intensity of combat to exert additional pressure during negotiations.”

From a military point of view, the current Ukraine army, supported by the West and with almost one million men, is almost unrecognizable in relation to the underfinished and poorly equipped force that faced Russia -backed separatists in 2014.

And yet by “accepting” a temporary ceasefire proposal, Ukraine faces a double challenge.

Firstly, Russia has been moving forward in recent months in the Eastern front (although with a huge cost of personnel and equipment) and inflicting almost daily air attacks on Ukrainian cities. Secondly, the US, so far the largest ally in Ukraine have recently suspended crucial military aid, in response to a public quarrel between Zelensky and US President Donald Trump in the White House oval room. The help has already been restored, but the episode left Ukraine on unstable ground.

“This makes Ukraine’s situation now very precarious,” said Sabine Fischer, who is part of the German Institute for international and security matters. “Ukraine, from the perspective of the Trump administration, has become an obstacle to the normalization they intend for their relations with Russia.”

2. There are no quick agreements

Experts agree that Minsk’s agreements were in a hurry as violence increased. Johannes Regenbrecht, a former German civil servant who was involved in the negotiations, stressed in a recently published article that Ukraine allies had reached a point in February 2015, in which they feared to allow Russia to continue without control “would have resulted in the Ukraine de facto secession under Moscow control.”

In retrospective, according to experts, the document that resulted from there was very ambiguous with regard to the implementation of the agreement. The most sensitive question was how to associate military provisions (ceasefire and weapon removal) with policies (local elections and a “special regime” in the areas controlled by separatists).

“Ukraine argued that it first needed security and then could implement political provisions. Russia said that once the political provisions were implemented, the separatists would be pleased and stop fighting, ”said Dumoulin, currently director of the European Foreign Council’s ‘Extended Europe’ program. This initial disagreement was a first sign of what Dumoulin and other experts consider it to be Moscow’s final intention to use Minsk’s political provisions for greater control over Ukraine.

Fischer argues that Trump’s desire to end war quickly suggests that the US may not only be in danger of reaching a hurry in a hurry, but may also be willing to settle for something that does not offer long-term solutions. “Comprehensive ceasefire agreements are not quickly negotiated. They are very complicated, with many intricacies. And I don’t think this is the goal of the Trump administration, ”he explained to CNN.

3. Beware of false narratives

In the end, the biggest problem with Minsk’s agreements, especially Minsk II, was not what was written in the text, but what was not. There is not a single mention of “Russia” throughout the text, despite the clear evidence that Russia was setting the separatists and sending reinforcements from the Russian army.

“Everyone knew Russia was involved, but for the sake of negotiations, this was not recognized,” Dumoulin said. “The agreements were based on the fiction that the war was between the separatists of Donetsk and Lugansk and Kiev, and that it was ultimately an internal conflict.”

There is no direct parallel these days, but there is, according to experts, the risk of Moscow is using the false narrative that Zelensky is illegitimate because he has not been able to conduct elections – Ukrainian law clearly stipulates that elections can not be carried out during the martial law – to revalue war as being resolved internally in Ukraine and ultimately provoke a regime change.

And there is yet another more worrying issue for Ukraine: the fact that the US adopted a similar line with Trump last month to label Zelensky from “a dictator without election,” although later it seemed to distance itself from this statement.

The failure of Minsk’s agreements leaves no doubt about the risks of perpetuating such falsehoods.

At the time, the fiction that Russia was not an aggressor or part of the conflict, along with insufficient pressure on Moscow, in the form of sanctions or supply of lethal military material to Ukraine, meant that Minsk never addressed the main cause of the conflict.

“Minsk’s fundamental contradiction was that Putin wanted to end Ukraine as an independent nation. Consequently, I had no interest in a constructive political process, ”wrote Regenbrecht.

There is no evidence that this position has changed. In his speech of 21 February 2022, three days before the large -scale invasion, Putin described Ukraine as “an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” before claiming that “Ukraine never had stable traditions of a true state.”

In January this year, one of his closest advisors, Nikolai Patrushev, said he could not exclude that “Ukraine ceased to exist next year.”

Thus, even with US promises to keep Ukraine out of NATO and forcing to accept territorial losses, the negotiating teams in Saudi Arabia, it seems – like their predecessors in Minsk – have not yet come close to solving this central question.