8 - A Frozen Conflict Thaws

Summary

Chapter 8 concludes our analytic narrative. We describe the politically frozen, yet militarily hot conflict from 2015 until 2022. Russian military intervention in the Battles of Ilovaisk (end of summer 2014) and Debaltseve (February 2015) produced the Minsk Agreement, backed by France, Germany, and eventually the UN Security Council, whereby Russia sought to impose conditions on Ukraine over the status of the disputed Donbas territories and the sequence required for Ukraine to regain control of its borders. Kyiv rejected this interpretation of Minsk, resulting in a diplomatic stalemate. The stabilization of the de facto frontier in the East took on familiar characteristics of a frozen conflict. On its side of the line of control Ukraine became more Ukrainian in terms of national cohesion and language/memory policies. On the other side of the line, the DNR/LNR became more Russian. Consistent with our model predictions, the policy preferences of the Ukrainian West met less resistance. In the final part of the chapter, we describe Putin’s decision to abrogate the Minsk Process and initiate a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s account of the conflict is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix B).