France’s new president is riding high, following his comfortable win in the presidential elections, and his new party En Marche has won a significant majority of the seats in France’s parliamentary elections too.
However, his successes at the polls and his relative inexperience in high office can’t be used as excuses to brush aside significant errors or misstatements, particularly where lives are at risk. And misunderstanding the peace process regarding Ukraine, signed in Minsk, risks lives.
Just two days before he was elected president of France, then-candidate Macron said in a TV interview that “the real difficulty with the Minsk process, is that Ukraine itself is deviating from it.”
It is not just Macron who has adopted misconceptions about what Minsk really means and who is responsible for breaching it or not upholding it. Minsk misconceptions pervade in many articles published about the conflict in Ukraine, and more misconceptions pervade in the mind of many respected reporters, diplomats, and regular citizens in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Bringing factual perspective to the battlefield realities of the Ukrainian conflict, the title of this recent Atlantic Council article by John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, “Russia, Not Ukraine, Is Serial Violator of Ceasefire Agreement” is unambiguous.
The second Minsk peace agreement was signed under duress. It took over 24 hours to negotiate, and the mistakes in the structure and content of Minsk are a reflection of the fatigue that must have been felt at the end of this arduous process. It’s not perfect. That said, to those who have studied it and understand it, Minsk remains a road map towards returning peace to Ukraine, if we believe that the parties to Minsk actually want peace in Ukraine and are therefore willing to respect it.
There are many perceived problems with Minsk. It lacks sequencing apparently, (if we overlook the numbers next to each point), it is truly amazing that such a flimsy excuse for not adhering to a ceasefire, the basic requirement that equates to “stop killing people”, has been accepted by some parties as sound reasoning.
The serious problem with Minsk, and the reason why it is not being implemented, is that it does not have provision setting out specific costs for failure to comply with commitments made therein. Of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin would never have agreed to a deal that had any mention of costs, as he had no intention of fulfilling Minsk obligations from day one. This, today, is abundantly evident.
Russia was breaching their Minsk commitments from the moment they were due to come into effect. The ceasefire element of Minsk II was due to start 72 hours after the papers were signed, but by that time the important strategic railway hub city of Debaltseve had not fallen, and so the Russian army, with Russian main battle tanks, just carried on fighting, pummeling the city and its population alongside the Ukrainian army positions for several days after the guns should have fallen silent.
Approximately 200 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the post-Minsk II Russian capture of Debaltseve. Around 500 civilians perished. Minsk was essentially dead on arrival, because Russia suffered no cost for this failure to even meet point one of their commitments, and so continually and flagrantly ignoring Minsk became the norm for Russia from that point on.
Contrasting this blatantly obvious Russian war against a sovereign nation, in international reporting on Ukraine’s Minsk progress we often see a false equivalency, where Ukraine’s perceived failures are considered to be on a par with Russia’s multifaceted attempt to sheer off a chunk of Ukraine, and this is then explained by language referring to the implementation of political elements of Minsk as “unpalatable.” This distraction from reality is almost a cliché, one based (both in and out of Ukraine) on incorrect interpretations of Ukraine’s obligations. Specifically:
- An election law needs to be passed, and it will be once the body charged with agreeing conditions for elections (the trilateral contact group) can come to an agreement on how the election would go ahead. Minsk is clear, elections must be held under Ukrainian law, and OSCE/ODIHR standards must be met.
The trilateral contact group has failed to give parliament some basis on which to write the election law. This is the actual choke point, not in Ukraine’s parliament.
- The Constitution of Ukraine needs to be changed. An argument that Ukraine should not be forced to make Constitutional Changes while at war isn’t unreasonable. However, the specific point of Constitutional change (the only one) is to adopt a decentralized approach to local affairs. Good. This is long overdue, and is as relevant to Zaporizhzhya as it is to the Donbas. Nothing unpalatable here.
- The “contentious” Special Status law needs to be passed. The name here is probably the most contentious thing relating to this point. The Special Status essentially allows people in the currently occupied areas to speak whatever language they want and trade across the border with Russia.
There’s a part of the Special Status that allows for a local “militia” (as in police force,) however Ukraine has wisely trialed an effective and attractive new police structure and so it’s doubtful that the “local militia” element of the Special Status would continue to be relevant after all of Donbas returns to central government control.
Think this is a stumbling block today? The Special Status Law was passed on 17/03/15, a month after Minsk II was signed.
- There is an amnesty requirement. As there was in the first Ukraine peace deal, signed in Geneva, as there was in the Good Friday Peace Agreement, signed in Stormont. That is understandably unpalatable. All amnesties are for some people.
- According to some, the requirement to grant autonomy to these areas is difficult for Kyiv to come to terms with. And, as difficult or unpalatable as it might be, that’s what was agreed to in Minsk. The problem here is that even though prominent figures may say this in articles in reputable publications like the Financial Times, it just isn’t true. There is no provision for autonomy in Minsk. That word is absent from Minsk, simply because granting autonomy to these regions was never agreed to. As a Financial Times consumer for roughly two decades, I’d rather have seen this wording amended or corrected, rather than excused, but the assertion that autonomy for Donbass is already agreed upon, made three times, remains in place. Misinforming people, from very credible sources like this is exceptionally dangerous.
Despite wild assertions by populist politicians in Ukraine, heard and accepted as fact by their followers, Minsk does not pose risks to Ukrainian sovereignty in any way. The agreement does not allow Russia control over Ukraine’s Constitution. Nothing in Minsk means giving up an inch of Ukrainian soil or giving up on the Ukrainian citizens that are stuck behind the contact line.
What is that contact line? Is it some kind of natural barrier behind which are ethnic Russians and Russian speakers who simply want to live in a different system from the “other” people on the other side of the line? No, it’s a manufactured line on a map, that line has ebbed and flowed because of guns and tanks, and it bears no relation to the ideals of the people who live on either side of it. There is little difference between the people of Slovyansk and their fellow Donbas natives living in the city of Donetsk itself, other than, of course, Slovyansk has been free and peaceful since liberation in July of 2014.
When Monsiuer Macron met in person with his Russian counterpart, Macron redeemed himself from the May 15 faux pas this article opened with by declaring, very bluntly, “Russia has invaded Ukraine.” France’s new President seems to have woken up to this reality because of the intelligence briefings his post affords him, but this isn’t a secret to anybody who has observed and documented this conflict. Russia has invaded Ukraine, that’s the problem. Minsk is a tool to get them out, of eastern Ukraine at least.
While people fail to understand what Minsk says, and misunderstand the reasons for lack of implementation, people are dying.
