The last time Ukraine and Russia agreed to a ceasefire deal – what went wrong?

"The ceasefire proposal presented by the US on Tuesday and accepted by Ukraine is part of a plan to end this conflict in a sustainable manner," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

It is a promise fraught with danger for Ukraine.

The last time it signed a peace agreement with Russia, 10 years ago, it brought only sporadic violence, growing distrust, and eventually full-scale war.

"I told President (Donald) Trump about this," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

"If you can get Putin to end the war, that's great. But know that he can cheat. He cheated me like this. After the Minsk ceasefire," he added.

It is known that the Minsk Agreements – the first signed in September 2014 and the second known as Minsk II just five months later – were created to end a bloody conflict between Kiev forces and Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Russia's Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's then-leader Petro Poroshenko were signatories, along with the OSCE.

But the agreements were never fully implemented, and violence flared up periodically in the seven years that followed.

Now, as Ukraine and its allies try to forge another path to peace, experts warn that the failures of Minsk serve as a warning to today's peacemakers and that the dangers of history repeating itself are clear.

Here's what history teaches us.

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Ukraine's military buildup is critical

In 2015, Western military aid to Ukraine was minimal and largely limited to non-lethal supplies, although the Obama administration supplied defensive military equipment.

“The crisis cannot be resolved by military means,” said then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a speech at the 2015 Munich Security Conference, which coincided with the Minsk II talks.

Her assessment of these diplomatic efforts was blunt: "It is unclear whether they will succeed."

It didn't help that both Minsk agreements were signed immediately after or during major military losses for Ukraine.

The first agreement followed what is believed to be the deadliest episode of the conflict in Donbas, in Ilovaisk.

In late August 2014, hundreds of Ukrainian troops were killed as they tried to flee the city to escape the siege, writes CNN, the Telegraph reports.

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Six months later, Minsk II was signed as fierce fighting took place for another Donetsk city, Debaltseve.

That battle continued for several days beyond the initial ceasefire deadline.

"Basically the main goal, both for France and Germany, but also for the Ukrainians, was to end the fighting," said Marie Dumoulin, a diplomat at the French embassy in Berlin at the time.

"Russia, through its representatives, but also directly, was in a much stronger position on the battlefield, and thus could increase the intensity of the fighting to exert additional pressure on the negotiations," she added.

From a military perspective, today's Western-backed Ukrainian army is hardly different from the underfunded and ill-equipped forces that faced Russian-backed separatists in 2014.

And yet, as Ukraine “accepts” a temporary ceasefire proposal, it faces a dual challenge.

First, Russia has in recent months been advancing on the eastern front (albeit at a huge cost in personnel and equipment) and has launched almost daily airstrikes on Ukrainian cities.

And second, the US, Ukraine's biggest supporter, has now withheld crucial military aid, in response to a public disagreement between Zelensky and Trump.

The aid has now been restored, but the disruption has left Ukraine with extensive damage.

"This makes the situation in Ukraine now very uncertain," said Sabine Fischer, senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

"Ukraine from the Trump administration's perspective has become an obstacle to this normalization that they want for their relations with Russia," she added.

There is no quick deal

Experts agree that the Minsk agreements were drafted in haste as violence escalated.

Johannes Regenbrecht, a former German civil servant who was involved in the negotiations, stressed in a recent letter that Ukraine's allies had reached the point where they worried that allowing Russia to proceed unchecked "would have resulted in the de facto secession of eastern Ukraine under Moscow's control."

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In retrospect, experts say, the resulting document left a lot of uncertainty when it came to implementing the agreement.

The most acute issue was how to link the military provisions (ceasefire and withdrawal of weapons) with the political ones (local elections and a “special regime” in areas controlled by the separatists).

"Ukraine was saying, we need security first and then we can implement the political provisions. Russia was saying, once the political provisions are implemented, the separatists will be satisfied and stop fighting," Dumoulin said.

And this initial disagreement was an early sign of what Dumoulin and other experts see as Moscow's ultimate goal of using Minsk's political provisions to gain greater control over Ukraine.

Fischer argues that Trump's desire to end the war quickly suggests that the US may not only be at risk of reaching a deal in a hurry, but may actually be willing to settle for something that offers no long-term solutions.

"Comprehensive ceasefire agreements are not negotiated quickly, they are very complicated. And I don't think that's what the Trump administration is aiming for," Fischer said.

Beware of "fake stories"

In the end, the biggest issue with the Minsk agreements, especially Minsk II, was not what was in the text, but what was not.

There is no mention of the word “Russia” in the entire text, despite clear evidence that Russia was arming the separatists and sending reinforcements from the Russian military.

"Everyone knew that Russia was involved, but for the sake of negotiations, this was not recognized," Dumoulin said.

"The agreements were based on the fiction that the war was between separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk and Kiev, and that ultimately it was an internal conflict," she added.

There is no direct parallel today, but there is, experts say, a risk that Moscow is now using the false narrative that Zelensky is illegitimate because he failed to hold elections – Ukrainian law clearly states that elections cannot be held during war – to reframe the war as something that must be resolved within Ukraine and ultimately bring about regime change.

And even more worryingly for Ukraine is that the US has taken a similar line, with Trump last month labelling Zelensky "a dictator without an election", although he later appeared to distance himself from that statement.

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The failure of the Minsk agreements leaves no doubt about the dangers of perpetuating such lies.

At the time, the fiction that Russia was not an aggressor or party to the conflict, coupled with insufficient pressure on Moscow in the form of sanctions or the provision of lethal military supplies to Ukraine, ultimately meant that Minsk never addressed the root cause of the conflict.

“The fundamental contradiction of Minsk,” Regenbrecht wrote, “was that Putin sought to end Ukraine as an independent nation.”

Otherwise, there is no evidence that this position has changed.

In his speech on February 21, 2022, three days before the start of the aggression, Putin described Ukraine as “an inalienable part of Russia’s history, culture, and spiritual space.”

In January of this year, one of his closest aides, Nikolai Patrushev, said he could not rule out "that Ukraine will cease to exist altogether next year." /Telegraph/