The Minsk Trap. Moscow’s Perversion of the Conflict Arbitration Process in Ukraine

Abstract

This article is a multidisciplinary analysis of the Russian Federation’s exploitation of legal systems, both international and domestic, to pervert arbitration efforts in Ukraine. This short study seeks to address challenges in moving forward with future mediation efforts and asserts that the Russian Federation exploits Minsk II to contain and subdue Ukraine. Simultaneously, Russia overtly disassociates itself with its manufactured conflict in Donbas while covertly maintaining a violent stalemate in the region. It deceptively supports these arbitration efforts to satisfy international stakeholders, but has weaponized the process to achieve impunity in pursuit of greater geopolitical objectives and violations of Ukrainian sovereignty. This article offers an overview of the emerging concept of Malign Legal Operations, a notion which is colloquially known as lawfare. It highlights the Russian Federation’s use of this strategy to achieve impunity within a revisionist approach to the rule of law. Furthermore, it summarizes peacebuilding efforts in the Russo-Ukrainian war from the perspective of malign legal operations and assess Minsk II to be a trap used to reduce violence in the region on the Kremlin’s terms by creating a “frozen conflict” in the likeness of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. This article asserts that the Ukrainian law “On Special Self-Governance Procedure in Separate Regions of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts” is, de facto, the legal implementation of the Minsk Agreement without the accord being referenced by-name in the law. This fact, inter alia, serves Moscow by legally containing Ukraine and forcing a situation whereby the Kremlin’s objectives are pursued by Ukraine’s genuine and sincere desire to bring about peace in a conflict that was manufactured by the Russian Federation.

Keywords

• malign legal operations; lawfare; ukraine; ukrainian conflict; the minsk protocol; the normandy format; the trilateral contact group; the steinmeier formula; donbas; the donetsk people’s republic (dpr); the luhansk people’s republic (lpr); conflict mediation; peacebuilding; great power competition