The White House bust-up between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy — leading to a US decision to suspend military aid to Ukraine — was triggered by an exchange over the terms of a possible ceasefire, with the Ukrainian leader demanding security guarantees to deter Russia from attacking again.
The US president on Monday dismissed concerns raised by Zelenskyy that Russia has form in breaching such agreements and suggested a peace accord could be struck with a different Ukrainian leader — a longtime Russian demand.
“It should not be that hard a deal to make,” Trump said. “It could be made very fast. If somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long.”
Zelenskyy has balked at the idea of a quick ceasefire, haunted, like many Ukrainians, by the period after 2014 when Moscow frequently flouted the terms of an armistice and political settlement.
Brokered by France and Germany, the so-called Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 were aimed at putting an end to the conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Moscow-backed separatists were backed by Russian troops.
“We don’t need any Minsk agreement,” Zelenskyy said on Sunday at the end of a flying visit to the UK where he attended a summit of European leaders. “It is a trap.”
Minsk has become a byword for diplomatic failure, which paved the way for Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It is a precedent Zelenskyy and his European supporters, including in Paris and Berlin, are determined to avoid repeating.
Zelenskyy tried to revive the Minsk deal in 2019 at a summit in Paris hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, but his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin did not reciprocate. Moscow was readily breaching the ceasefire — although Ukrainian forces occasionally also broke the truce.
“Russia was using this tactic of bringing in snipers and conducting live training,” Zelenskyy said on Sunday. “They were killing both civilians and military. Children. It was completely savage.”
Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for any ceasefire to be enforceable, including through commitments from Ukraine’s allies to come to its defence if attacked again.
In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump dismissed Zelenskyy’s concern as unimportant, confirming Ukrainians’ fears that he wants a peace accord at any cost.
“I don’t want to talk about security yet, because I want to get the deal done,” Trump said. “Security is so easy, that’s about 2 per cent of the problem. I’m not worried about security. I’m worried about getting the deal done.”
Zelenskyy on Sunday quoted former US president Ronald Reagan: “Peace is not just the absence of war.”
European leaders have joined Zelenskyy in warning of a repeat of the Minsk fiasco.
“We have to learn from the mistakes of the past,” said UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at the end of Sunday’s London summit. “We cannot accept a weak deal like Minsk which Russia can breach with ease. Instead, any deal must be backed by strength.”
Much of Macron’s conversation with Trump at the White House last week revolved around the need for a durable ceasefire before a peace settlement, a senior French official said afterwards, “so we can avoid in some way history repeating itself”.
That meant the Russians “making commitments that can be verified, measured and, in case they are broken, can be met with a robust response from the Europeans and their American allies”, the person said.
Officials involved and analysts said the agreements were seriously flawed either in the design or the implementation.
They were “a strange mix between a ceasefire and a settlement agreement”, said Thomas Greminger, a Swiss diplomat and former head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the body responsible for monitoring the truce. “That was very unfortunate. There was no clarity in terms of implementation. There was no clear sequencing.”
Greminger, now the head of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, listed other shortcomings: there was no clarity in the line of contact between the two sides and no fully fledged disengagement zone to keep forces apart; and, crucially, there was no accountability for violations.
Ukrainian officials also complain the OSCE’s unarmed monitors were not robust enough to call out ceasefire breaches.
The French official said the fact that the current frontline now stretched more than 1,000km, as opposed to 400km at the time of Minsk, was precisely why it was essential to “convince the Russians of an ensuing riposte if they start again”.
Christoph Heusgen, diplomatic adviser to former German chancellor Angela Merkel, who brokered the Minsk accords alongside then French president François Hollande, said he did not regard them as a mistake. “It was what was possible at the time. The mistake was what happened afterwards.”
It could have worked with “some goodwill” from Russia, Heusgen said, adding Berlin should have done more to help Ukraine afterwards.
The Minsk accords were struck in 2014 and 2015 at moments of acute vulnerability for Ukraine with its forces facing a rout on the battlefield. Paris and Berlin at the time went along with the fiction that Russia was not party to the conflict, but only the pro-Russia separatists.
Those circumstances no longer applied, said Marie Dumoulin, a former French diplomat who helped oversee implementation of Minsk and now with the European Council on Foreign Relations. But the need to strengthen Ukraine’s position remained paramount, she said. “The main lesson we should draw at this stage is don’t approach this as if we need a deal whatever the cost.”
Pavlo Klimkin, who served as Ukrainian foreign minister from 2014 to 2019, said Ukraine’s situation today was “fundamentally different”.
“Minsk was about de-escalating and buying time”, whereas a peace deal with Russia could include difficult trade-offs and a “change to the status quo”. These “hard trade-offs” could explicitly or implicitly involve the country’s sovereignty, he said.
Sabine Fischer, a senior fellow for eastern Europe at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the only lessons to be learnt from the Minsk debacle were technical ones because the geopolitical context had changed dramatically since 2015.
First, for a “radicalised” Putin “it’s no longer about control over Ukraine”, Fischer said. “It is really about control over Europe, this whole idea of a new division of Europe into spheres of influence.”
Second, “since last Friday, everyone should understand that the US really has switched sides. And there is actually no longer a united west with a clear position in this conflict.
“The Ukrainians are being attacked by both sides.”
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