How Russia negotiates ceasefires and value of agreements with Moscow

Contents:

1. How relations with the Russian Federation began and how predecessors had to negotiate with Moscow.

2. Post-Soviet treaties and fake agreements on Ukraine's territorial integrity and inviolability of borders.

3. Russia's first invasion of Ukraine and agreements in Minsk.

The March articles, the Budapest Memorandum, the Minsk Agreements – these are the most well-known, but far from the only treaties that the Ukrainian people have had to make with Moscow. Espresso will tell you how agreements with the Russian Federation end and the price that those who signed them had to pay.

How relations with the Russian Federation began and how predecessors had to negotiate with Moscow

By mid-2025, many of Ukraine's allies understood the consequences of appeasing dictators and the cost of trying to make peace at any cost when an aggressor comes to destroy you. However, even today, there are still advocates of the belief that an agreement can resolve the problem and calm a centuries-old policy of hatred and total destruction. Moreover, this belief persists even after the violation of the so-called "Easter truce," which resulted in 20 deaths in Kryvyi Rih and 12 in Kyiv. Among the dead were nine children killed by Russian missiles.

If the aforementioned, after three years of mass killings, executions, and genocide, is still not enough to understand that peace with Russia is a fiction, one only needs to look back. Ukrainian history offers enough examples of what happens when trying to reach an understanding with those who come to destroy you and your home. The most recent examples are particularly telling, especially considering that the leadership in the Kremlin has not changed since those times.

However, let’s first look back to the era of the Cossacks. The first person to try to negotiate with the then Tsarist Moscow was Bohdan Khmelnytskyy. The March Articles, signed in Pereyaslav in 1654, were not actually a peace agreement, but rather an agreement for the protection of the Cossack Hetmanate by Muscovy. It is difficult to assess the document and its impact on the present since the original has not survived. However, history teacher and winner of the Global Teacher Prize Ukraine 2020, Vasyl Djakiv, notes that even back in the 17th century, two completely opposing worldviews – European and Asian – collided.

“European political traditions, which the Hetmanate had absorbed, collided with the Asian approach of Moscow’s foreign policy for solving its expansionist interests. This approach was based on the principles of Golden Horde governance, strength, and the unconditional submission to the tsar without any signs of respect or partnership with the opposing side,” writes the teacher.

Historian Serhiy Plokhiy, in his work The Gates of Europe, states that both sides had fundamentally different perceptions of these agreements.

“The Cossacks saw the Pereyaslav Agreement as a contract binding both sides. From Khmelnytsky’s perspective, he and his state were coming under the protection of the tsar. They promised loyalty and military service in exchange for the protection offered by the Muscovite state. However, the tsar saw the Cossacks as new subjects, to whom he owed no obligations once he granted them certain rights and privileges,” explains the professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University.

The last thesis is particularly interesting, as it shows that whether today or nearly 400 years ago, Russia defines agreements not as arrangements for equal cooperation but as a means of suppressing and further exploiting a potential enemy.

This is precisely what is reflected in the content of the March Articles – the Hetmanate retained its internal hierarchy, legal and tax systems, but was obligated to notify the Russian tsar about the election of the hetman, limit the army's size to 60,000 soldiers, and maintain the Russian army at its own expense, which was now legally stationed on the territories of the Cossack state.

In the 17th century, the Russian tsar was somewhat more lenient and thus declaratively granted the Hetmanate the right to conduct foreign policy. However, this was coupled with a ban on establishing diplomatic relations with its nearest neighbors – the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire.

As we can see, even then, the Tsarist Moscow tried to block the Hetmanate’s path to forming strong alliances and securing its place on the geopolitical map. This is what can be equated with the agreements being imposed on Ukraine today – a ban on joining NATO and even discussions about it.

Interestingly, this very approach played a cruel trick on those who signed the March Articles. While the Hetmanate adhered to the ban on conducting negotiations, the Russian tsars secretly decided its fate with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth three times.

Later, Khmelnytsky's son, Yurii, would attempt to revise the agreements with Muscovy after his father’s death. However, instead of securing sovereignty, he received the Pereyaslav Articles of 1659, which further tightened the tsarist restrictions on the Hetmanate.

Thus, the territories of present-day Ukraine entered the period known as the "Ruina," which would unfold after the so-called "Black Council," pro-Russian hetman of Left-bank Ukraine Ivan Bryukhovetsky, and the Moscow Articles.

Post-Soviet agreements and fictitious arrangements about Ukraine's territorial integrity and inviolability of borders

Later, during the period of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), the century-long occupation of part of Ukraine by Bolsheviks, as a result of World War I, would occur. This includes the collapse of Austro-Hungary and the complex revolutionary events in Germany, as the members of the Quadruple Alliance were a restraining factor for the RSFSR and a guarantee of security for the Ukrainian People's Republic.

Enduring oppression, genocides, political repression, and the destruction of culture and the people as such, in 1991, Ukraine would manage to win independence and recognition of its sovereignty.

Subsequently, in 1994, President Leonid Kuchma signed the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine pledged to adopt a non-nuclear status in exchange for vague but sweet "security guarantees."

"The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that no weapons of theirs will ever be used against Ukraine, except for self-defense or in any other manner consistent with the Charter of the United Nations," the second point of the memorandum stated.

It is difficult to say whether this was a planned and calculated strategy of the Russian Federation under Yeltsin to disarm its neighbor, or if the civilized world genuinely feared a new member in the "nuclear club."

However, as BBC has already noted, even Leonid Kuchma, who signed the document, understood the ineffectiveness of the Budapest Memorandum. The second President of Ukraine acknowledged that after signing, he was warned about the emptiness of the memorandum's guarantees.

"At the time, French President François Mitterrand said, 'Son, don’t believe this document, you’ll be deceived,'" Kuchma said at an international conference in Jerusalem.

Later, Ukraine, a full decade before the full-scale war with Russia, would repeatedly turn to the signatory countries for help. Initially, it called for urgent consultations during the conflict over the Tuzla Island in 2003 and during the Ukrainian-Russian "gas war" in 2006.

The Ukrainian parliament would also appeal to the signatories of the Memorandum to reaffirm their commitment to the principles in March 2014, when Russia began its annexation of Crimea. At that time, the USA initiated consultations in Paris with the countries participating in the Budapest Memorandum. The meeting included then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the UK Foreign Minister William Hague, and the acting Foreign Minister of Ukraine Andriy Deshchytsia. No representatives from the aggressor country attended, and later, Russia would completely reject such consultations.

Going back to the 90s, Ukraine would once again fall for a Russian agreement – the "Big Treaty" between Ukraine and Russia, which was signed on May 31, 1997. According to it, the Russian Federation "recognizes the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine's borders."

And it sounds important, of course, but its main precondition was the "Trojan Horse" left in Sevastopol in the form of the Black Sea Fleet.

As journalist Vitaliy Portnikov writes in a column for "Radio Free Europe," without the Russian fleet in Ukrainian Sevastopol, no one had planned to sign the "Big Treaty."

Yeltsin knew very well how interested Kuchma was in his visit. Moscow linked the conclusion of the "big" treaty with the signing of an agreement on the status of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. Without this agreement, Yeltsin did not want to travel to Kyiv or sign the treaty. Moreover, at a certain stage of the negotiations, the Russian side even refused to include a clause in the document about mutual recognition of territorial integrity, although it was included in the agreement between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR, signed by Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk before the collapse of the USSR. The Ukrainian delegation realized that without an agreement on the fleet, there would be no "big" treaty, at least not a document with concrete substance," Portnikov wrote in 2018.

Later, the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol would become a foothold for the forceful spread of the "Russian world" on the territory of Ukraine, and in 2003 it would lead to the conflict over Tuzla and become one of the reasons why President Kuchma would reject Euro-Atlantic integration into NATO and begin negotiations for the creation of a Single Economic Space with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. 

The first Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory and the agreements in Minsk 

Later, when Ukraine was weakened after the Revolution of Dignity, a reliable and friendly neighbor took advantage of the situation to begin the introduction of "little green men" into Crimea and activate separatist forces in Donbas, which it had essentially "nourished" itself.  
The response to this was the Minsk agreements of 2014, which established a temporary ceasefire in the war in eastern Ukraine.

The protocol was signed by the participants of the Trilateral Contact Group, including the then-special representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Heidi Taljavini, the second president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, the then-ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, Alexander Zakharchenko, and Igor Plotnitsky.

Interestingly, the latter two were not mentioned in the signed documentation, although they were actually representatives of the Russia-backed militias controlling the self-proclaimed L/DPR territories.  

There is no definitive assessment of this agreement, and experts' opinions on the matter differ.  
For example, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin commented in 2021 to "Suspilne" that the agreements had their results but admitted their "wrongfulness."  

"In time, Minsk helped resolve humanitarian issues, like water supply. I wouldn't call it effective, but nonetheless some decisions were made within the Minsk framework. However, regarding other matters, such as the release of prisoners, Minsk didn't play a special role. That's why the decision to move political issues from the Normandy format to the Minsk platform was definitely a mistake and hindered the whole process," said the former minister.  

However, after the first Minsk agreement, which was a logical continuation of the Peace Plan by Ukraine's fifth president Petro Poroshenko and clearly did not suit Moscow, fighting in Donbas resumed. By early February 2015, fierce battles were raging for Donetsk airport and Debaltseve, where Russian forces, together with militants, tried to encircle Ukrainian troops. 

Subsequently, Vladimir Putin began to impose much harsher conditions on Ukraine, while simultaneously threatening to destroy its regular army. The key point of the second Minsk agreements was "special status for certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions," which Ukraine was obligated to enshrine in its Constitution. Moreover, according to "Minsk-2," local self-government bodies in Donbas could have their own statutes, which would, for example, allow them to enter into agreements with foreign states, have their own budget, hold local elections, and conduct referendums. 

"Our task was, first and foremost, to neutralize the threat or at least delay the war. We needed to buy ourselves eight years to restore economic growth and build the strength of the Armed Forces. That was the first task—and it was achieved," commented the fifth president in June 2022.  

A full evaluation of their content in light of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 will be left to historians in the future.  
However, one thing is definitively known – any agreements with Moscow, regardless of the political system and leadership in power, are a fiction that will inevitably be used against Ukraine. Therefore, today's "peace" being imposed by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump will only be viewed by Russia as an opportunity for rearmament, restoring its reputation on the geopolitical map, and recovering from Western sanctions.