Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

The new deal overlapped significantly with Minsk I. But it reflected the separatists’ and Russians’ gains on the battlefield, which Putin used to garner several key concessions from Poroshenko. Reform of the Ukrainian constitution was made the lynchpin of the peace process. Furthermore, the agreement was much more specific than the earlier document about how to sequence the provisions. In particular, Russia would only have to return control of rebel-held areas of the border after Ukraine ratified the constitutional amendments.

Minsk II had serious shortcomings. In the field, the most significant were the lack of an agreed armistice line and an effective instrument to enforce the ceasefire and weapons withdrawal. The OSCE monitoring effort was, by design, not a peacekeeping mission, in contrast with initiatives in analogous conflict zones. Staffed by unarmed civilians and not uniformed military personnel, it was unable to ensure compliance.

These shortcomings manifested themselves almost immediately in the battle for Debaltseve, a transportation hub between Donetsk and Luhansk cities. Five days after Minsk II, Ukrainian government troops took heavy losses in a haphazard exit from the town. Estimates of casualties varied, ranging from one dozen to hundreds, and 100 or more Ukrainian soldiers were taken prisoner. The UN reported that 500 civilians were found dead in their homes.[60] Following the capture of Debaltseve and surrounding territory by the separatists, there has been a stable ‘line of contact’ demarcating rebel-controlled from government-controlled areas. It is a jagged semicircle bounded by the Russian border to the east and tracing far north of Luhansk city, northwest of Horlivka and Donetsk city, and west of Novoazovsk, on the Sea of Azov (see map 4: Separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, November 2016). It marked off slightly less than one-third of the territory of the two oblasts.

While violence did subsequently subside, the conflict-resolution process soon stalled. The stalemate resulted from divergent understandings of where the process should lead. For the Kremlin, Minsk II represented the practical implementation of Moscow’s stated objective of reworking Ukraine’s institutions in order to cement Russian influence over Kyiv, thereby denying the West geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-ideational victory. Minsk II itemised the enhanced rights for the separatist areas (such as circumscribing Kyiv’s control over law enforcement there) and compelled Kyiv to negotiate a constitutional reform with the separatists that codifies autonomy for their fiefdoms inside Ukraine. Based on the published version of the constitutional amendments proposed by the separatist negotiators, all of the same demands in the 15 March document, including neutrality and enhanced status for the Russian language, were still alive.[61]

Ukraine, having committed through its president to some form of this outcome at Minsk, has refused to follow through on it. Only the parliamentary opposition, mostly one-time members of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, has voiced support for fulfilling Minsk II in its entirety. Denunciations of the agreement as unsatisfactory or even treasonous have been far more commonplace among the political elite. Some favoured biding time until the Donbas can be retaken by force, a scenario referred to as the ‘Croatian option’, a reference to Croatia’s forceful retaking of the Srpska Krajina in 1995. Others said Ukraine should press forward with some elements of Minsk II, but only enough to disprove claims that Kyiv is responsible for its failure.[62]

In the short term, Kyiv’s tacit preference was for a frozen conflict: dodging the political aspects of Minsk II, but ending the active fighting while severing rebel-held Donbas from the rest of the polity. In this scenario, the line of contact would become a de facto border, like the inner German border during the Cold War. The influence of the Donbas over politics in the capital would be eliminated, and thus Moscow’s sway over Kyiv would be minimised. Russia would have to foot the bill for the reconstruction effort and for the costs of preventing a socio-economic implosion in its new protectorate.