Russia’s consistent and repetitive behaviour in relation to ceasefires provides instructive examples of mistakes to avoid in negotiations for Ukraine.
Russia has consistently proven itself adept at exploiting the eagerness of Western interlocutors to conclude ceasefire agreements, and by doing so, setting conditions for the resumption of conflict in the future and repeated ceasefire violations in the interim.
As detailed in the case studies of Moldova, Georgia and the Minsk agreements below, in previous conflicts Russia has repeatedly succeeded in persuading Western leaders to allow it to impose burdensome terms on its opponent, while preserving its own freedom to manoeuvre. There is no reason to think that in Ukraine too, Moscow would sign up to a ceasefire that it was not able to violate and that did not position Russia well for restarting major combat operations if needed.
The challenge of implementing ceasefire agreements concluded with Russia mirrors that of contracts in business, where Western-style agreements built around a presumption of good faith contrast with Russian-style contracts where specific and meaningful sanctions are specified for transgression, because transgression is anticipated and therefore explicitly deterred. It follows that any ceasefire agreement without robust means of deterring or punishing breaches will be ineffective and counterproductive. Accordingly, as also shown in the case studies below, Russia has repeatedly succeeded in ensuring that any mechanism for overseeing a ceasefire does not have the means to punish violations. In addition, Russia has repeatedly been able to position itself as a neutral party in negotiations and even the guarantor of a ceasefire agreement despite being the aggressor.
The plans of the ‘coalition of the willing’ in this regard (as currently publicly disclosed) remain vague to an extreme and easily open to manipulation by the Russian side. For example, proposals refer to a ‘Special Commission that will be established to address any breaches, attribute responsibility, and determine remedies’ without indicating who will do this or how it will be achieved. The plans also claim that a multinational force to secure peace has ‘the proposed support of the US’ but give no detail on how this support would manifest itself and under what conditions. This lack of precision, if carried forward into an actual ceasefire, is a key enabler for Russia as described above.
Case studies: Tested Russian strategies for freezing conflicts
The ceasefires in the three cases below provide an indication of the Russian template for turning temporary situations into permanent outcomes. For the implications of this approach in the current case of Ukraine, and recommendations for mitigating these implications, see Chapter 6.
Moldova
Shortly after the collapse of the USSR, armed conflict broke out in the Transnistria region of Moldova, the sliver of territory on the east bank of the Dniester River where a substantial part of the population did not identify culturally with Moldova’s post-Soviet nation-building project that elevated the Romanian language over Russian. In 1990, the Transnistrian authorities had declared a breakaway republic with backing from Moscow in the same way as Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk established ‘people’s republics’ in 2014 in response to the ousting of the Yanukovych regime during Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution.
The fight for the control of Transnistria began in early March 1992 and ended in July that year. Russia’s 14th Army stationed in Transnistria took the side of the separatists and stopped the advances of Moldovan forces. At this point, Moldova and Russia signed a ceasefire agreement, after Moscow had ensured that Romania was excluded from what Bucharest intended to be a quadripartite peace initiative (Moldova, Romania, Russia and Ukraine). The July 1992 agreement froze the conflict on Russia’s terms, legitimizing the presence of the 14th Army on Moldovan territory as a ‘neutral’ peacekeeping force and not setting a timetable for its withdrawal. Implementation of the agreement was to be carried out by a Joint Control Commission involving Moldova, Russia and Transnistria, with no role for international organizations. Russia became the ‘guarantor’ of peace, even though it was not a neutral player.
The ceasefire model deployed by Russia in Moldova has been replicated in several other conflicts, with adaptations. The ‘frozen conflict’ it created has outlasted some of those other conflicts, in the sense that fighting has not restarted; although this also reflects the fact that unlike in Georgia and Ukraine, Russia does not have direct land access to the conflict zone in order to restart it. Putin’s recent decree to make it easier for residents of Transnistria to obtain Russian passports shows how these territories could be used to replenish Russian armed forces.
Georgia
In August 1992, Georgian forces tried to bring to heel the leadership of Abkhazia, a territory within Georgia that had the status of an autonomous republic within Soviet Georgia before the collapse of the USSR. Russian military support was key to the success of Abkhaz forces in capturing Sukhumi, the region’s capital, in September 1993 and establishing a de facto separatist entity.
A ceasefire agreement was signed by representatives of Georgia and Abkhazia that established a regiment of Abkhaz internal troops under the control of a Joint Commission with the purpose of guarding the main road and important facilities. This provision de facto legitimized the creation of Abkhaz defence forces and ensured the autonomy of Abkhazia. As in the case of Moldova, Moscow deferred the issue of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgian territory. The main innovation in this agreement was the establishment of a UN Observer Mission in Georgia to monitor compliance of the ceasefire. This mechanism provided legitimacy for Russia while not requiring it to give up control as ‘peacemaker-in-chief’. The UN mission’s mandate came to an end in 2009 after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war that led to Moscow recognizing the independence of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In the ceasefire brokered by the French presidency of the EU between Georgia and Russia in 2008, Russian peacekeepers previously stationed in South Ossetia were made responsible for the region’s security while there was no reference to the territory as part of Georgia. Moscow flatly rejected the proposal of the EU presidency to deploy an EU or UN peacekeeping force to the region. For a second time, Russia used the ceasefire process to introduce a framework endorsed by an international organization that made it impossible for the authorities of the original state to re-establish sovereignty in a breakaway region.
Russia’s ‘borderization’ policy, the demarcation of the internal borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within Georgia, that began in 2017 is designed to secure Russia’s grip on both territories and to force Tbilisi to accept the independence of both areas.
The Minsk agreements
In the aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, Moscow quietly seized Crimea and tried to launch a counter-revolution by encouraging rebellions in several cities in southeastern Ukraine. However, Russian proxies masquerading as ‘separatists’ established control only in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The declaration by the new Ukrainian authorities of an anti-terrorist operation to uphold Kyiv’s rule in the two regions, and a surprisingly quick operation to recover control, led to the recapture of large areas (including the city of Mariupol) and forced Moscow to increase economic, military and political support to its proxies. This included direct military intervention by Russian armed forces across the border to prevent the defeat of groups composed of local recruits and Russian intelligence officers and mercenaries.
The declaration by the new Ukrainian authorities of an anti-terrorist operation to uphold Kyiv’s rule, and a surprisingly quick operation to recover control, led to the recapture of large areas and forced Moscow to increase economic, military and political support to its proxies.
To consolidate its control, Moscow once again initiated a ‘peace process’ that circumvented international efforts (in this case, a nascent ‘Geneva format’, which included Ukraine, the US, the EU and Russia). The Russian substitute process initially involved a contact group consisting of former Ukrainian president Kuchma (who was respected by Putin), the Russian ambassador to Ukraine and a senior OSCE representative. The resulting ceasefire agreement known as Minsk-1 signed in September 2014 did not hold. It included the granting of a special status for parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions based on a temporary Ukrainian law that enabled elections to be held there. Unarmed OSCE personnel were responsible for verification and monitoring of the ceasefire, but their efforts to do so were rendered largely pointless by the absence of any mechanism for punishing violations.
The failure of Minsk-1 led to the negotiation of the Minsk-2 agreement in February 2015. The negotiations took place between presidents Putin and Poroshenko in the so-called Normandy format with French president François Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel as mediators. As the negotiations took place, Russian forces intervened on the ground alongside the so-called ‘separatists’ to seize the logistically important town of Debaltseve and threatened to advance further. Under military pressure, Ukraine signed a highly disadvantageous ceasefire agreement, while Russia continued to deny that it was backing proxies.
Putin’s goal was to force authorities to hold elections in the territories controlled by Russian proxies and use the results to reinforce temporary special status arrangements that would then become permanent within a framework of decentralized power in Ukraine. This would lead to Kyiv forfeiting its sovereignty over these regions and give Russia a permanent foothold there. This Trojan horse would undermine efforts by Kyiv to orient the country away from Russia and would thus make Euro-Atlantic integration impossible.
However, poor drafting made the agreement’s sequencing requirements unclear. As a result, while Kyiv pointed to the need to restore control of its national border before agreeing to a political settlement, Moscow insisted that the agreement required Kyiv to devolve power to the two regions before re-establishing control of the border. The result was a stalemate, punctuated by constant violations of the ceasefire by Russian and proxy forces and dangerous harassment and intimidation of OSCE monitors.
Moscow’s hopes that Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s accession to the presidency would bring a different approach from the determination of his predecessor proved misplaced. Despite campaigning on a peace ticket, Ukraine’s new president quickly understood that Russia’s version of peace meant a fundamental challenge to Ukraine’s independence and was politically impossible. Thus, to achieve its objectives, Moscow eventually decided on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a whole.
