The Minsk Agreements – more than “scraps of paper”?

ABSTRACT

The implementation of the Minsk Agreements has been flawed and failure-prone, but they remain the key politico-legal frameworks of reference for addressing conflict transformation and settlement in East Ukraine. This article investigates how and why the Minsk Agreements’ troubled implementation has been shaped by typical or non- typical characteristics of contemporary internationalised and legalised peace agreements. It helps to unpack the Minsk Agreements’ “limbo between failing and the imperative of not failing”, leading to a discussion of ways to approach the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements from pragmatic perspectives beyond the binary distinction between success and failure.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine Crisis
• Minsk Agreement
• political settlement
• peace agreement
• ceasefire
• international law
• conflict settlement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Cindy Wittke is leader of the junior research group “Frozen and Unfrozen Conflicts” with the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, and since March 2019 principal investigator of the project group “Between Conflict and Cooperation – The Politics of International Law in the post-Soviet Space” funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Before taking up her position with the Leibniz-IOS, she was a senior post-doctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department of Politics and Public Administration of the University of Konstanz, Germany (2014–2017). Additionally, she is an external programme associate of the Political Settlement Research Programme, University of Edinburgh, Global Justice Academy. Cindy Wittke earned a Magistra Artium (M.A.) in East European Studies (2007) and a Ph.D. in Law (summa cum laude) from the Faculty of Law of the Freie Universität Berlin (2014). In the academic year 2007/2008 she worked as a lecturer for European and International Law at Yerevan State University in Armenia sponsored by the Lectureship Programme of the Robert Bosch Foundation. Cindy Wittke’s research is situated at the intersection of international law and politics and is based on her interdisciplinary background as well as on her previous affiliation with several interdisciplinary research centres. These include Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood at the Freie Universität Berlin (2006–2010); the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cambridge (2009, 2010); and the Centres for Law, Society & Culture, and for Constitutional Democracy at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in Bloomington (2013–2014). Cindy Wittke published amongst others with the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law (now Cambridge International Law Journal), the Heidelberg Journal of International Law (ZaöRV), and the Review of Central and East European Law. Her first monograph “Law in the Twilight: International Courts and Tribunals, the Security Council and the Internationalisation of Peace Agreements between State and Non-State Parties” was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Notes

1 My analytical perspective on the Minsk Agreements and the Minsk Process differs from that of Jakob Landwehr, whose contribution to the Symposium “Five Years After: The Role of International Actors in the ‘Ukraine Crisis’” is focused, from a negotiaton theory perspective, on exploring the role of conflict mediators and the potential avenues towards breaking the “Minsk stalemate”.

2 Sebastian Relitz offers in his contribution to the same Symposium a comparative analysis of DPR and LPR with other non-recognised de facto state entities using his “stabilization dilemma” – approach.

3 The extended debates over the causes of these conflict constellations are beyond the scope of this article, see e.g. Galbreath and Malyarenko Forthcoming 2019; Malyarenko and Wolff 2019; Wittke 2018b.

4 Referring here to debates regarding state responsibility in international law, see e.g. Boon 2014 (from a general perspective); Szpak 2017 (focusing on Ukraine).

5 The Normandy Format was created on 6 June 2014, when leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine met on the margins of the 70th anniversary of the “D-Day” in Normandy. The Format is supposed to support a conflict settlement and transition process in the eastern regions of Ukraine, the members are in regular contact, especially on the level of senior diplomats.

6 It is typical that the ICJ avoids any form of general evaluations of the legal nature of the conflict, the status of the conflict parties, and in the end, the nature of the obligations created in a peace agreement or cluster of agreements (Wittke 2018a, 83 et seq.).

7 Examples are the KROC Peace Agreement Matrix: https://peaceaccords.nd.edu (Accessed 13 March 2019); UN Peacemaker’s Peace Agreements Database: https://peacemaker.un.org/document-search (Accessed 13 March 2019); The “Language of Peace” database: https://www.languageofpeace.org/#/ (Accessed 13 March 2019); and the PA-X Peace Agreements Database: https://www.peaceagreements.org/search (Accessed 13 March 2019).