Part 1 of my Minsk agreements series

I have been working since 2021 on this project regarding the roots of the Ukrainian elite’s opposition to the Minsk peace agreements. It has involved a great deal of research (reading just about everything published on the liberal Ukrainian internet about the Minsk agreements), and it is a topic which is extremely dear to me. I wanted to understand the roots of this war, an event which has transformed my life. My opinions on this topic have also cost me all ties with one of my parents. Recently, I finally finished the draft of this article. Instead of sitting on it forever while ‘editing’, as I often do with articles, I decided to release finished sections of it. The current draft is sitting at 13,000 words. Eventually I hope to publish it as a single academic article. Hopefully posting it on here will be interesting for my readers, and helpful for me in formatting it.

Minsk, February 11 2015

‘We must understand that the war in the east is in fact a war against Russia for Ukraine and her European future… The world must know that Europe ends with us.’

– Viktor Ukolov, Verkhovna Rada deputee in ‘Ukrainian Truth’, June 2014

Introduction

Generally, analysis regarding the history of the Minsk peace agreements blames its failure on certain abstract qualities. For instance, the militarism of one or both sides. But war is a means to accomplish political goals – there is no militarism for the sake of militarism. What political rationale led to militaristic rejection of compromises?

The violation of ‘sovereignty’ is another common topic. Certain ‘left voices’ which ‘support Ukraine’ often refer to ‘sovereignty’ as the grounds for which endless war should be encouraged, and any dissidents to such a course punished.

Oksana Siroid, deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada at the time, published a 2016 article which spends a great deal of tme explaining how the minsk agreements stipulations regarding decentralization, federalization, minority language rights and other measures violate Ukraine’s sovereignty. But every country’s sovereignty is constantly restricted by various means, through trade agreements, international agreements, and assumptions about what one’s neighbours may consider unacceptable, whether one likes it or not. Ukraine’s sovereignty was restricted in various ways by its free trade agreement with the EU, as some of my articles have explored.

Violation of sovereignty generally means some form of restriction which does not allow the violated country to do what it would otherwise like to. If Ukraine’s sovereignty was violated by the Minsk agreements, how exactly? What exactly would the implementation of the Minsk agreements have prevented the Ukrainian government from doing?

This article is about the critiques levelled against the implementation of the Minsk peace agreements (signed in late 2014 and finalized in 2015) by influential Ukrainian newspapers and political figures. I will not be closely analyzing the Minsk agreements themselves, which are quite short and can be read here.

The bulk of research for this article was done by reading all articles and interviews published on the topic of the Minsk agreements by the Ukrainian newspaper ‘Ukrainian Truth’. UP (and its subsidiary ‘European Truth’, ET) is an influential liberal, ‘euro-optimist’ paper which frequently features interviews with or columns by members of the government and influential pro-European political activists. It has existed since the early 2000. It was created in 2000, following a trip to Washington by a group of Ukrainian journalists in 1999. Their 1999 trip aimed to bring light to alleged human rights abuses in Ukraine. Though information about USAID grants in Ukraine is now quite difficult to find, pro-western publications claim that UP received US aid from its very inception. sponsored largely by USAID. It is currently owned by Dragon Capital, a Ukrainian company partnered with George Soros. It is a sort of New York Times of Ukraine, presenting the ‘party line’ of the liberal establishment on current events.

Material from radiosvoboda (a Ukrainian subsidiary of radiofreeeurope) was also used, as well as interviews, think pieces, and telegram posts by influential Ukrainian politicians and political organizations. I have focused mainly on liberals (the ruling class in Ukraine), but one of the later topics of this article is convergence between liberal and rightwing nationalist forces on the topic of Minsk.

What were the problematic parts of the Minsk agreements?

The answer to this question was undisputed – it was the political section of the minsk agreements which was dangerous. UP articles constantly identified the problem in the holding of elections in the separatist regions of Donbass, without military control over the region by the Ukrainian army.

An article by radiosvoboda on the Minsk agreements also highlighted the 9th point regarding elections as ‘the most controversial’. It claimed that this point was what made Zelensky call the Minsk agreements ‘handcuffs’ and ‘a defeat’ in 2020, and to state that he would have not signed the agreements, were he to be in the same situation.

A 2016 article ‘Red Lines of Minsk. Statement of Ukrainian Experts’ published on UP was primarily concerned with elections: ‘local elections can only take place on completely demilitarized territory’, and warned against ‘contradictions between the constitutional division of power and implementation of the law regarding particularities of self-government in certain parts of Donetsk and Lugansk regions’.

There were other aspects of the Minsk agreements which were also opposed by the literature analyzed – such as essentially total amnesty for those separatist fighters and political figures considered ‘terrorists’ in Ukraine, a clause stipulating special political, economic and juridical rights for the Donbass region, and a clause stipulating the existence of a local Donbass police force. Ukrainian government representatives also opposed Minsk’s stipulation to pay the pensions of residents of the L/DNR without its ‘deoccupation’ by the Ukrainian army.

All of these things, however, were rejected for the same reasons as the clause on elections – because, as Roman Bessmertny (Ukrainian representative to the trilateral contact group on the war in Ukraine from 2014-2016) said, the problem of Minsk’s political aspects was that it ‘gave political subjectification to Donbass’. Serhii Garmash (a journalist and representative to the trilateral contact group) had a particularly pithy summation of why the Minsk agreements were unacceptable which he gave in January 2022 - they involved ‘subjectivizing the LNR and DNR as sides of the conflict, which is equivalent to the capitulation of Ukraine’.

This radiosvoboda interview with Garmash was titled ‘Putin wants to conquer Ukraine through the Minsk agreements’ - in the months before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s media sphere was abuzz with suspicions that Russia would convince the west to force Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements, resulting in a flood of adamant condemnations of any such possibility. My first (perhaps rather over-optimistic) article on this substack concerned this topic.

As well as having been one of Ukraine’s representatives in the TCG, Garmash is a common contributor to radiosvoboda

Lack of militarized purges of the L/DNR political elite, wide-ranging political amnesty, regional special political rights, and the possession of a separate police force would institutionalize the Donbass as a separate centre of power in Ukraine, whether such a situation was named ‘an autonomous republic’ or not. The rest of this article will try to explain why it was considered that this ‘political subjectification of Donbass’ was considered unacceptable.

The Minsk ‘trap’

UP articles were unanimous in their distaste for the Minsk agreements. A 2019 UP article claimed that Ukraine has ‘exhausted its possibilities’ with Minsk. A 2021 UP article claimed that Minsk had ‘exhausted itself’.

But what exactly was so bad about a peace agreement which would have returned the separatist regions of Ukraine back to Ukraine (much to the disappointment of the separatists themselves)?

A 2017 UP article was titled ‘After Minsk’. In the opinion of the article, the nationalization of Ukrainian property in the L/DNR in 2017 – regarding which, the article says that ‘it must be admitted’ was a result of Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries enacting a gun-enforced economic blockade on the L/DNR against the meek protestations of the Ukrainian government – meant that Minsk was no longer viable. One of the subtitles of the article, hardly able to restrain its glee over separatist actions that endangered minsk, was ‘shaking off the minsk constrictor’.

This metaphor of the ‘constrictor’ is telling. Minsk is conceptualized as a mechanism which forcibly holds Ukraine somewhere.

Similar metaphors abound. A 2015 article on UNIAN, Ukraine’s most-visited news site, was titled ‘The Minsk trap which Ukraine finds itself in’. It describes them as having been ‘created in a rush and quite thoughtlessly’. In 2017, UP published an article by Hanna Malyar (now deputy Minister of Defence) titled ‘the trap of peaceful agreements and peace plans’.

This idea of the Minsk ‘trap’ is important. A common (and easily palatable) argument against the Minsk agreements is that they violated Ukrainian sovereignty in forcing it to change its constitution under the military threat of Russian and Russian-backed separatists. This is often backed up by reference to the fact that they were signed in the context of military defeats over the Ukrainian army.

But while this may be considered undesirable, it is not a ‘trap’, since there is nothing which might appear positive about this. A ‘trap’ involves the victim agreeing to something which appears to be in its interests, but which in the future turns against its interests, even destroying the entrapped subject. One of the writers we will later analyze compares Donbass as a whole to a limb stuck in a wolf trap, whereby Ukraine must ‘gnaw off its paw’ (abandon Donbass and the Minsk agreements) in order to ‘survive’, which is equated to joining the EU and NATO. The trap, according to the article, is to not gnaw off the limb - the trap is to go along with the Minsk agreements, to reintegrate Donbass into Ukraine.

The ‘trap’ is that while the Minsk agreements would have reintegrated the separatist enclaves, this reintegration would in the longer term prevent the realization of the post-2014 Ukrainian elite’s strategic interests in euro-atlantic integration, and even challenge its continuation of economic liberalization and maintenance of state power.