Russia-Ukraine Ceasefire Negotiations: Lessons from the Failed Minsk Process

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, numerous efforts have been made to forge a diplomatic path towards peace. So far, these efforts have failed to produce a political settlement to the conflict, let alone a functioning ceasefire. The belligerents – Russia and Ukraine – have widely diverging views of the conflict’s underlying causes, what it would take to bring it to an end, and what the terms of a negotiated settlement should be.

It is important to keep in mind that Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine did not start in 2022. It started in 2014, when Russia occupied the Crimean Peninsula and launched what came to be known as “the Donbas war”. In the period between April 2014 and February 2022, this conflict claimed more than 14,000 lives. A significant share of these lives were lost after the signing of two ceasefire agreements known as “Minsk I” and “Minsk II”, signed in September 2014 and February 2015. Much to the frustration of the agreements’ Western backers, these ceasefire agreements remained largely unimplemented throughout the following eight years. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

To get better and deeper understanding of the causes of the current war, as well as the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a negotiated settlement, one needs to examine why and how previous diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s war have failed. Drawing on theoretical insights from the negotiation studies literature, this policy brief seeks to shed light on the diplomatic processes that preceded the signing of the Minsk agreements, as well as the practical difficulties that the parties were facing, and created for each other, in the implementation phase.