Creating the conditions for negotiations is not the same as creating the conditions for their success, as eight years of unsuccessful attempts to bring peace to eastern Ukraine sadly testify.
Ukraine
The First Days of War
Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is difficult to understand and impossible to justify within the bounds of normal rationality.
Why the idea of a ‘neutral’ Ukraine is a non-starter in peace talks
Muddying the diplomatic waters further with an unpalatable, and in all likelihood unattainable, “solution” wastes precious time and resources that now would be better devoted to achieving a stable ceasefire and an end to Russia’s aggression.
Ukraine: no easy path to peace
The presidential elections in Ukraine on May 25 were meant to offer the country the beginning of a way out of a protracted crisis.
The high-risk game of Ukrainian separatism
The coming days and weeks will tell how serious all the players in and around Ukraine are about contributing to resolving this ever-more dangerous crisis and whether Kiev, Moscow, Brussels and Washington can rise above their own short-term and increasingly narrow interests and agendas and prevent the unnecessary bloodshed that further escalation would inevitably bring with it.
Ukraine–a pivotal moment for international relations?
The Ukraine crisis may thus yet turn out as an event with consequences as momentous as the end of the Cold War or 9/11.
Breakthrough in Ukraine talks is a win-win situation, especially for Russia
A new status quo in the post-Soviet space is obviously in the making, and it has a distinctively Russian flavour to it.
Is the West powerless to stop the Russian aggression against Ukraine?
Rather than simply buying into our own rhetoric of a norms- and values-based international society, we must be prepared to back up such rhetoric with credible policies to protect these norms and values and abide by them ourselves.
All eyes on Russia as Ukraine hurtles towards civil war
The Ukrainian government has announced that it will mount a full-scale military operation to regain control of the east of the country and has set a deadline of 6am on Monday morning for occupied government buildings to be evacuated by armed protesters. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council late on Sunday night failed to calm a situation that has significantly deteriorated over the past few days.