Wikipedia Deep Dive

Minsk agreements

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The Peace Deals That Weren't

In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed." Two days later, Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border in the largest land invasion Europe had seen since World War Two. But the truth is, these agreements—supposedly designed to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine—had been dying a slow death for eight years. They were signed under duress, violated almost immediately, and ultimately served as little more than diplomatic theater while the killing continued.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to 2014, when Russia quietly began dismembering its neighbor.

The Shadow Invasion

In February 2014, unmarked Russian soldiers—soon nicknamed "little green men" by observers who noted their suspiciously professional military bearing and Russian equipment—seized control of Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula jutting into the Black Sea. Russia would later annex Crimea outright, but at the time, the Kremlin denied any involvement. This would become a pattern.

Almost simultaneously, protests and unrest erupted in eastern and southern Ukraine. Researchers still debate how much of this unrest was genuinely local discontent and how much was organized from Moscow. What's clear is that by spring 2014, two unrecognized statelets had emerged in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine: the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic. The Kremlin wasn't inventing this playbook from scratch—Russia had used similar techniques to carve out separatist enclaves in Moldova and Georgia during the 1990s.

These weren't really independent republics in any meaningful sense. They were Russian proxies, dependent on Moscow for money, weapons, and increasingly, soldiers.

Ukraine Fights Back—Then Loses

Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in the summer of 2014. For a while, it worked. Ukrainian forces recaptured significant territory. The separatists were on the back foot.

Then Russia intervened directly.

Throughout the summer, Moscow had been sending special forces operatives, irregular fighters, and small units of regular Russian troops into eastern Ukraine—all while officially denying any involvement. But in late August 2014, Russia dropped the pretense of subtlety. Large numbers of unmarked Russian regular military forces poured across the border to rescue their faltering proxies.

The result was catastrophic for Ukraine. At the Battle of Ilovaisk, Ukrainian forces found themselves encircled by what were clearly professional Russian military units. The defeat was devastating. Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were killed or captured. Some were shot while retreating under what was supposed to be a safe passage agreement.

Russia had saved its Donbas proxies from collapse. Now it wanted to lock in its gains.

Minsk One: Signing Under the Gun

With Ukrainian forces reeling from Ilovaisk, negotiations convened in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. The talks brought together an unusual collection of participants: Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the OSCE. The leaders of France and Germany—François Hollande and Angela Merkel—mediated what became known as the Normandy Format.

The separatist leaders also signed, though their "self-declared functions" were pointedly not mentioned in the document. This ambiguity was deliberate. Ukraine didn't want to legitimize the breakaway republics. Russia wanted exactly that.

On September 5, 2014, the parties signed the Minsk Protocol—sometimes called Minsk One. The agreement contained twelve points that sound reasonable enough on paper: an immediate ceasefire, monitoring by the OSCE, release of hostages, withdrawal of illegal armed groups and foreign mercenaries, and eventual local elections.

There was just one problem.

Almost none of it happened.

A Ceasefire That Wasn't

Within two weeks of signing, both sides were already accusing each other of violations. The parties met again on September 19th and signed a follow-up memorandum that tried to clarify how the original protocol would actually be implemented. It called for banning combat aircraft over the security zone, pulling heavy weapons back fifteen kilometers on each side to create a thirty-kilometer buffer, and withdrawing foreign mercenaries.

A fragile ceasefire emerged. Fragile is perhaps too generous a word.

Fighting continued at the Donetsk airport, which had become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. The terminal building, once a gleaming modern structure built for the Euro 2012 soccer championship, was slowly reduced to rubble as Ukrainian defenders held out against repeated assaults.

In late October 2014, Alexander Zakharchenko—the prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and a signatory to the Minsk Protocol—announced that his forces would retake territory they had lost to Ukraine during the summer offensive. He later claimed he'd been misquoted and meant they would use "peaceful means." Few observers found this convincing.

Then, in November, the separatist republics held elections—in direct violation of the Minsk Protocol, which called for elections to be conducted under Ukrainian law. The head of the OSCE called the elections "counter to the letter and spirit of the Minsk Protocol."

The agreement was unraveling.

The Second Collapse

By January 2015, the ceasefire had completely disintegrated. Russian forces and their separatist allies captured the Donetsk airport, finally overwhelming the Ukrainian defenders who had held out for months in the bombed-out ruins. A separatist spokesman declared that the Minsk Memorandum would not be "considered in the form it was adopted."

Zakharchenko was more blunt. His forces, he said, were going to "attack right up to the borders of Donetsk region." There would be no more ceasefire talks.

Russia repeated the pattern from August 2014. Fresh Russian military forces crossed into Ukraine and attacked Ukrainian positions at Debaltseve, an important railway and road junction. The fighting was intense. Ukraine suffered what observers called a "devastating" defeat.

Western governments, horrified by the escalation but unwilling to intervene militarily, scrambled for a diplomatic solution. French President Hollande and German Chancellor Merkel put together a new peace plan. Hollande called it the "last chance" for resolution.

The proposed Franco-German plan was partly a response to American suggestions that the United States might send weapons to Ukraine. Merkel opposed this, arguing it would only worsen the crisis. Europe's leaders wanted diplomacy, not arms.

Minsk Two: Sixteen Hours in Belarus

On February 11, 2015, the key players gathered at the Independence Palace in Minsk. Putin represented Russia. Poroshenko represented Ukraine. Merkel and Hollande were there as mediators. The separatist leaders also attended.

The negotiations went on for sixteen hours straight, through the night. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier described them as "very difficult."

When dawn broke, the parties announced they had agreed to a new package of measures—the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, better known as Minsk Two.

On paper, it was more detailed than Minsk One. The ceasefire would begin at midnight on February 15th. Heavy weapons would be pulled back from the front lines—at least fifty kilometers for artillery, seventy kilometers for multiple rocket launchers, and even further for the most powerful systems. Prisoners would be exchanged. The OSCE would monitor everything using satellites, drones, and radio-location systems.

The agreement also called for something more politically sensitive: constitutional reform in Ukraine that would grant a degree of self-government to the separatist-held areas. Ukraine would need to pass legislation giving special status to these territories. There would be local elections, conducted according to Ukrainian law but granting amnesty to those who had participated in the conflict.

Here was the fundamental tension that would poison everything that followed.

The Impossible Sequence

The Minsk Two agreement contained what might be called a sequencing problem—though calling it a "problem" understates the fundamental incompatibility of what different parties wanted.

Ukraine's position was straightforward: first, Ukraine needed to regain control of its border with Russia. Otherwise, how could any election in the separatist territories be legitimate? Russian weapons, fighters, and influence would continue flowing in. Any vote held under those conditions would be a sham.

Russia and the separatists saw it differently. They wanted Ukraine to first hold elections and grant special autonomous status to the territories. Only then would Ukraine get its border back.

You can see the logic from both sides. But you can also see why neither side would budge. Ukraine would be legitimizing puppet governments installed through Russian military intervention. Russia would be giving up its leverage before securing the constitutional changes it wanted.

A German diplomat named Frank-Walter Steinmeier—yes, the same one who had called the negotiations "very difficult"—proposed a compromise. Under what became known as the Steinmeier Formula, the separatist territories would receive a temporary special status on election day, which would become permanent only after the OSCE certified that the elections met international standards.

It sounded reasonable. It went nowhere.

The Frozen Conflict

What followed Minsk Two was not peace. It was what international relations scholars call a "frozen conflict"—fighting that subsides but never ends, a wound that neither heals nor kills.

The ceasefire reduced the intensity of combat, but soldiers kept dying along the line of contact. Occasional artillery exchanges would punctuate weeks of tense quiet. Neither side implemented the agreement's political provisions. The OSCE monitors reported violations and were sometimes prevented from accessing areas they were supposed to observe.

For nearly eight years, this continued. Diplomatic meetings produced diplomatic statements. Nothing fundamental changed. The separatist territories remained in limbo—not part of Ukraine, not recognized by most of the world, entirely dependent on Russia.

Some observers argued this was precisely the outcome Russia wanted. By keeping the conflict simmering, Moscow prevented Ukraine from moving westward. A country with an active territorial dispute cannot join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO. The unresolved status of the Donbas gave Russia a permanent veto over Ukraine's future.

Others pointed out that Ukraine had little incentive to implement agreements signed under military duress. The constitutional changes Russia demanded would effectively give Moscow's proxies a stranglehold over Ukrainian politics. Why would any Ukrainian government agree to that?

The Diplomatic Aftermath

In the years after Minsk Two, various participants in the negotiations gave revealing interviews about what had actually happened.

Angela Merkel, in a 2022 interview after leaving office, said the Minsk agreements had given Ukraine "precious time" to strengthen its military. This comment infuriated Russia, which cited it as evidence that the West had never intended to implement the agreements in good faith—that Minsk had been a trick to buy time for arming Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials expressed frustration that the agreements had been imposed on them after military defeats, when they had little bargaining power. The terms, they argued, were fundamentally unfair.

Russian officials claimed they had always been willing to implement the agreements but that Ukraine and its Western backers refused to follow through. This ignored the rather significant detail that Russian military forces had invaded Ukraine to create the crisis that the agreements were supposedly meant to resolve.

Everyone had their own version of why Minsk failed. The only point of agreement was that it had, indeed, failed.

The End of the Pretense

By early 2022, tensions between Russia and Ukraine had reached a breaking point. Russia had massed over 100,000 troops near Ukraine's borders. Western intelligence agencies warned that an invasion was imminent. Moscow dismissed this as hysteria.

On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin convened Russia's Security Council for a televised meeting—though "meeting" is perhaps too generous a term for what was clearly a staged performance. Putin asked each member for their view on recognizing the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. One by one, they agreed.

That evening, Putin signed decrees recognizing the separatist territories as independent states. The Minsk agreements, which had been premised on these territories eventually reintegrating into Ukraine with special status, were now formally dead.

The next day, Putin blamed Ukraine for the agreements' collapse. The day after that, he launched the full-scale invasion.

What the Minsk Agreements Tell Us

The Minsk agreements were never really about peace. They were about managing a conflict that Russia had started and that Russia had the power to end at any moment—by withdrawing its forces and stopping its support for the separatists. That was never going to happen.

For Ukraine, the agreements represented a terrible choice imposed by military defeat: accept terms that would give Russia leverage over Ukrainian politics, or reject them and face continued military pressure. Ukraine chose a middle path, signing the agreements while refusing to implement the provisions that would have given Moscow what it wanted.

For Germany and France, the agreements represented the limits of diplomacy when dealing with an adversary willing to use military force. Merkel and Hollande worked genuinely to find a peaceful solution. But diplomacy requires both parties to want a deal more than they want to keep fighting. Russia didn't.

For Russia, the agreements served their purpose as long as they kept Ukraine in limbo. When that was no longer useful—when Putin decided to gamble on a full invasion—the agreements were discarded.

The Minsk agreements are often cited in discussions about whether negotiated settlements can end the current war in Ukraine. The lesson most observers draw is sobering: agreements signed under military pressure, with terms that favor the aggressor, tend not to hold. They freeze conflicts rather than resolving them. And frozen conflicts have a way of thawing at the worst possible moment.

Whether that lesson will be heeded remains to be seen.