Also, one has to make a clear distinction between Poroshenko and Russia BOTH failing on Minsk 1 while Ukraine (under Zelenskyy) and the DPR were making significant progress on Minsk 2 before Russia threw its teddy out of its pram 12 months ago.
Which bits of Minsk 2 had seen no progress at all?
Minsk 2 his agreement was a follow up to a previously ATTENPTED & FAILED Minsk 1 peace treaty of 2014. Ultimately, the Minsk II process also failed.
Regarding this, I found these quite process theories interesting:
1. REALISM
Realism is an international relations theory that focuses on states as actors, their security fears due to uncertainty, and their desire to dominate each other. Many have applied this theory to the Ukraine conflict to argue that all great powers tend to naturally dominate their surrounding areas. Ukraine has been part of Russia’s “sphere of influence,” so Putin/Russia would want to keep Ukraine as a friendly buffer state. The expansion of NATO into former Soviet and Russian territory also adds to Putin’s paranoia.
Although Minsk II did include points to grant the breakaway regions: greater autonomy, amnesty, and the promise of elections, for realists miss the point. Any accord that “ignores the threat to hard power and geopolitics, or worse pretends they don’t exist, is “doomed to failure” to those following the relations theory of realism.
2. SPOILER THEORY
The field of conflict resolution looks at situations from a multilevel perspective: watching for ‘spoilers’ is useful to explain for Minsk II’s failure with the realism theory.
Former UN Assistant Secretary General Stephen John Stedman. argued that “The greatest source of risk comes from spoilers- leaders and/or parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests, then will use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.”
Stedman warn interventionists if they do not take into account the existence of spoilers and how to manage them are more likely to fail in their efforts to bring about peace.
National, as well as international policy is as Thucydides wrote in the Melian Dialogue: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”