Attempts to reach ceasefire in Ukraine littered with years of failure

Russia’s ceasefire in Ukraine lasted only 30 hours, and even then it appears to have been very limited in scope, with accusations of violations on both sides.

Kyiv said there had been no “air raids alerts” on Sunday during Vladimir Putin’s “Easter truce” and President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested this could be the “easiest” format to extend for 30 days and possibly more.

The US had tried to organise a 30-day ceasefire but that never took hold, and this latest chapter underscores the difficulty in achieving even a brief pause in fighting,

Russia insisted on a number of conditions, including a halt to Ukraine re-arming and recruiting new fighters as well as “underlying causes of the conflict”.

One major factor hampering the talks’ progress is the long history of broken ceasefire deals, resulting in deep mistrust between the two neighbours.

During his tempestuous meeting with Donald Trump in February, Zelensky accused Russia of violating 25 ceasefire agreements since 2014, and argued that no such deal would hold without security guarantees.

In turn, Russia accuses the Ukrainian president of being “incapable” of implementing any such agreements.

Independent experts say Russia bears the brunt of the blame for broken truces, even though Ukraine bears some responsibility, too.

Statements by current and former Russian officials also indicate that Moscow would be prepared to cease hostilities, only if its original objectives are achieved – namely a demilitarised, neutral and non-nuclear Ukraine.

By invading Ukraine in 2014, Russia violated the Agreement on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the two countries signed in 1997. Article 2 said the sides “respect each other’s territorial integrity and confirm the inviolability of existing borders between them”.

The war has been rife with accusations of treachery from the very beginning.

Gen Viktor Muzhenko, the chief of Ukraine’s General Staff at the time, accuses Russia of going back on agreements allowing Ukrainian troops to pull out from the eastern town of Ilovaysk in August 2014.

As a result, withdrawing convoys came under fire, and at least 366 Ukrainian fighters were killed.

The first major ceasefire agreement, signed on 5 September 2014 in Minsk, was broken within hours of being signed, with Ukrainian sources reporting attacks by Russian proxy forces on Donetsk airport. Attacks on other Ukrainian towns in the region, such as Debaltseve, continued, too.

This prompted the second attempted truce, known as Minsk-2, but it was even shorter.

Within minutes of it going into effect on 15 February 2015, observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reported mortar and artillery fire in Donetsk. They were deployed to the war zone at Ukraine’s request to monitor the security situation including any ceasefire violations, but they did not explicitly say who committed them.

What followed was a string of other failed ceasefire attempts. Again, some were broken within minutes of coming into force.

They included Easter truces in 2016, 2017 and 2018, the “school ceasefires” of 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 which were meant to allow schoolchildren near the frontline to go back to school in September, Christmas and New Year ceasefires in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, and the “bread ceasefires” of 2017, 2018 and 2019 to allow the harvesting of grain, and others.

A “comprehensive ceasefire” that went into effect on 27 July 2020 only lasted 20 minutes, according to Kyiv. Still, it had an effect on the fighting, halving the number of fatalities among Ukrainian soldiers in the following year.

Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, argues that Russia has never entered ceasefire talks in good faith.

“Russia has never been sincere about removing or ending the risk of the use of force in seeking its objectives,” he says.

Because of various ceasefire agreements between Ukraine and Russia, “the level of fighting has ebbed and flowed, and Ukraine bears some responsibility for part of that”, he tells the BBC.

“But the underlying challenge has been that there has always been a Russian or Russian-backed military threat, and that informs things.”

John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Kyiv who now works for the Washington-based think-tank Atlantic Council, argues that Russia, not Ukraine was the “serial violator” of the Minsk ceasefire accords, the first and still one of the most comprehensive attempts to broker a truce in Ukraine.

Verifying claims of ceasefire violations is not easy because almost all independent journalists are banned from Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine.

BBC journalist Olga Ivshina, who was on the ground in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region reporting about the earlier stages of the war, says there were reports of Ukraine retaking villages in 2016-19, a successful Ukrainian offensive outside Mariupol, and Ukrainian tanks were spotted too close to the frontline, where they should not have been under the ceasefire deals.

“All of these were proclaimed as violations by Moscow. But of course they forgot to mention that their capture of Debaltseve in 2015 was the biggest violation of all,” Ivshina says.

Despite the Minsk accords, Russian-controlled forces launched an offensive against the town of Debaltseve, claiming that it was not covered by the ceasefire deal.

Zelensky has described the Minsk accords as a “trap” for Ukraine which allowed Russia to prepare for the full-scale invasion.

Putin says neither Ukraine nor its Western backers had intended to implement the Minsk deals. Their fate was sealed when Russia declared the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” – separatist entities it had helped to set up – as independent states.

Putin’s “Easter truce” was never more than a lull, but President Trump said “hopefully Russia and Ukraine will make a deal this week”.

So far there has been no indication that the Kremlin will accept the US call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, agreed to by Ukraine.

Trump has already warned that if either party makes ceasefire talks difficult, “we’re just gonna take a pass” and walk away.

Russia’s demand for “the underlying causes of the conflict” to be resolved suggest it has not moved from its original objective of undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty – through negotiations as well as military means.

Vladislav Surkov, a former close adviser to Vladimir Putin who was known as the “grey cardinal” of Russian politics, celebrates the Minsk accords last year as a way of “legitimising” Ukraine’s initial partition.

The very idea of peace, he said, wass “nothing but a continuation of war by other means”.