Partial ceasefire comes with warning from Kyiv: Russia breaches deals

Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a limited ceasefire, which Kyiv said it hoped would lead to a broader peace agreement brokered by the United States. But for Ukraine, a persistent fear lingers over the process: What happens if Russia breaks its word?

Kyiv says its concerns emerge from the lessons of recent history. “We signed [a] ceasefire” in 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during his contentious Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump in February. Russian President Vladimir Putin “broke the ceasefire, he killed our people,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky’s admonitions, supported by a list of 25 times he says Russia breached ceasefires in Ukraine, helped spark a shouting match between the Ukrainian leader and Vice President JD Vance. The dispute almost derailed Kyiv’s talks with the Trump administration, although relations have since been restored to tentative normalcy.

Under the limited ceasefire, both sides are to avoid strikes on energy infrastructure. But hopes for a more extensive deal remain muted, and Ukraine has emphasized its case for security guarantees, a major sticking point for Washington.

The failure of the Minsk agreements

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha‎ said Friday that Ukraine was developing a team to track “appropriate action algorithms” to properly monitor a potential truce, adding that Kyiv needed to be prepared to avoid “possible provocations from the Russian side” and that it had learned from the “negative experience within the Minsk process.”

Ukrainians often point to the Minsk peace agreements, brokered in 2014 and 2015, as an example of the Kremlin breaching its promises. The agreements were negotiated in the Belarusian capital amid a war between Kremlin-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government, and Moscow’s unilateral seizure of the Crimean Peninsula.

Despite the backing of France and Germany and monitoring by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the ceasefires included in these agreements did not hold. Their collapse paved the way for the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The first agreement, known as Minsk I, broke down immediately after it was signed in September 2014. Ukrainian officials said Kremlin allies had repeatedly broken the ceasefire. The next September, as Ukraine sought to save a group of soldiers from encirclement in the eastern city of Debaltseve, it agreed to a follow-up accord, Minsk II.

Again, Ukraine said Russian separatist allies had broken the ceasefire, killing six soldiers within just a few days. Though the agreement technically remained in place, it failed to stop the bloodshed: Fighting in Ukraine caused nearly 14,000 deaths between 2014 and the end of 2021, according to the United Nations.

When Zelensky, a popular comedian who ran as an antiestablishment figure, won the Ukrainian presidential election in 2019, he pledged to make peace with Russia. He traveled to Paris to meet with Putin in a bid to reinvigorate the Minsk agreements in the hope they could lead to a lasting deal.

The new Ukrainian leader agreed to a prisoner swap and a ceasefire, but both failed. With little sign of compromise from the Russian side, Zelensky soured on the Minsk framework, analysts say.

Accusations on both sides

Marie Dumoulin, director of the wider Europe program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said it was difficult to say that Russia breached ceasefires as both Minsk agreements did not mention Russia as a participant in the conflict. Russia at first denied supporting the separatists.

“Breaches of the ceasefire happened on both sides, often because of isolated incidents that escalated,” said Dumoulin, a former French diplomat who was involved in the drafting of the agreements.

Though the OSCE tracked ceasefire breaches, it did not note which party to the conflict was responsible. The Kremlin has its own complaints, with state media arguing that Western powers used the Minsk agreements to give Ukraine more time to build its military.

In current talks, Putin has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine could use a U.S.-brokered peace agreement to regroup and rearm, with the aim of continuing the conflict - the exact argument Ukraine makes about Russia, which Kyiv said it fears will continue its land grab down the line.

“In Russia, it’s Ukraine who has the reputation for never complying with agreements, for what it’s worth,” said Sam Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand, a California think tank.

There is little debate that Russia breached the Minsk agreements in early 2022, as it massed its forces on the Ukrainian border while insisting it was not preparing to invade. At the time, Western interlocutors again urged Kyiv and Moscow to use the Minsk framework to prevent a full-on war.

Putin rejected the idea, saying in a February 2022 statement that the agreements “no longer exist” and recognizing the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” This explicitly breached the Minsk agreements, which were based on the idea that the separatist regions would return to Kyiv’s control.

Charap added that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had broken many agreements, including a 1997 treaty on friendship between the two nations known as the “big treaty,” as well as international law.

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Ukrainians say Russia’s behavior shows a pattern

Since the invasion, there have been other attempts at agreements that would halt the fighting, but efforts to broker a ceasefire, such as those pursued by Pope Francis, have had little impact. An international agreement to allow Ukraine to export grain and other commodities via the Black Sea collapsed when Russia pulled out.

Human rights groups have accused Russia of attacking temporary humanitarian corridors in Ukraine that are supposed to allow civilians to flee areas of heavy fighting.

Critics say Moscow has a pattern of using peace agreements and ceasefires as an opportunity to rebuild military strength for later attacks. In 1999, for example, Russia resumed its war against Chechnya - just three years after it signed a peace treaty with the breakaway republic after its military was humbled in a bloody war.

In a recent article, United24 Media, a Ukrainian government-operated fundraising platform, reached much further back in time for an example, arguing that Russia repeatedly breached its peace agreements with Sweden in the 17th century.

Charap said that the idea that Russia was “a challenging partner is not controversial anywhere really,” but that all peace agreements involve a degree of mutual distrust.

“There’s going to be a process of rearmament and operation on both sides,” he said, “because even if they don’t actually want to go back to war, they’re going to be concerned that the other side does.”

Dumoulin, the former French diplomat, said she could not imagine a mechanism that would avoid breaches of ceasefires, but you could “flank” a ceasefire by including provisions that make an inadvertent breach less likely and imposing clear punishments for the breaches that happen.

Mykhailo Soldatenko, a Ukrainian lawyer who has tracked negotiations with Russia, said it was important to have robust security and ceasefire management components that could not only track breaches but also effectively deter and punish them. He also stressed the importance of public support for an agreement.

“It’s important to get broader democratic buy-in for any arrangement, particularly the support of the Ukrainian parliament,” he said. “The imposed settlement with conditions that most Ukrainians see as unacceptable and illegitimate will run into significant obstacles at the implementation stage.”