Minsk-2: The Ceasefire Agreement and Roadmap

The agreement seems to contain many elements that will be essential for any longer-term settlement, and these represent concessions by all sides. Kiev seems to have accepted a measure of special status for the Donbas.

The Donbas and Russia appear to have accepted that Ukraine's borders will remain as they are and the Donbas will remain a part of Ukraine.

The chief difficulty, it seems to me, will be in persuading the fighters on the ground to comply with orders to retreat to the respective demarcation lines and actually cease fire. This has been a requirement of each ceasefire deal in the past, and each time it has failed because of those on the ground. It has never been enough to have agreement on paper, however elevated the negotiators. There was agreement way back last year between Kerry and Lavrov, which came to nothing, because they had no leverage over those fighting on either side.

That fighting appears to have intensified during and after the talks in Minsk does not seem to me to mean that the ceasefire is already over. It is natural that both sides should seek to maximize their positions in the run up to midnight on 15 February. The test is whether the guns fall silent thereafter.

The two big questions, aside from compliance with the actual ceasefire, in my mind are: will the rebels in the Donbas accept the degree of special status that is now on offer, given the number of casualties and the bitterness from the past year of fighting?

The other concerns the concept of the road map. The name doesn't generate that much confidence, given the fate of successive road maps in the Middle East, and the great difficulty with such plans is that one step depends on the previous one, and if the previous one - for instance, constitutional reform - does not happen, then everything else fails, too.

Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.