What Minsk and Dayton reveal about monitoring, military guarantees, and the distance between stopping a war and securing peace
A ceasefire can be watched without being kept. Monitors may record where fighting resumes, identify patterns of violation, and make denial more difficult. Yet their presence does not necessarily give them the authority or means to stop what they see. The distance between observing restraint and sustaining it is central to the history of the Minsk agreements—and to what their comparison with the Dayton Peace Agreement can, and cannot, explain.
The Minsk process began with the September 2014 protocol, which called for a ceasefire and a political settlement in eastern Ukraine. A memorandum signed later that month set out military measures for implementing the ceasefire. When fighting continued, the parties agreed in February 2015 to a more detailed package, commonly known as Minsk II. It provided for a renewed ceasefire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, OSCE monitoring, detainee exchanges, local elections, special self-government arrangements in certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, the withdrawal of foreign armed formations, and the eventual restoration of Ukraine’s control over its border. Its purpose was to connect an end to the fighting with a political settlement within Ukraine.
Fighting diminished at times, but ceasefire violations continued and the front line largely persisted. Negotiations stalled over security, elections, the status of the separatist-held areas, and border control. The order of implementation became a central dispute. Ukraine sought conditions under which local elections could be held credibly and safely, while Minsk II placed the restoration of full Ukrainian control over the border after those elections and a broader political settlement.
The parties revisited the political provisions through the Steinmeier formula in 2019 and agreed to additional ceasefire measures that took effect in July 2020. The OSCE subsequently observed less violence, but warned that the ceasefire was fraying in the absence of substantial political progress. Violations rose sharply in February 2022. Russia recognized the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk entities on 21 February and launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission ended its operations in March 2022.
The history raises a question: what can monitoring preserve when the parties have not established the political conditions that would allow a ceasefire to become peace?
The Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina offers a revealing comparison. Minsk II proposed a route toward a political settlement that never fully took hold. Dayton established an order that ended the war, while leaving the difficult work of return, governance, and reconciliation to continue over decades.
One important difference lay in the means of implementation. Dayton authorized the NATO-led multinational Implementation Force, or IFOR, to carry out the agreement’s military provisions, including the separation of forces. IFOR’s mandate lasted one year. It was succeeded by the Stabilisation Force, or SFOR, and later by the EU-led EUFOR Althea mission. The international military presence continued, although its forces and mandates changed.
That presence gave the military provisions a means of implementation beyond the parties’ own promises. It helped establish conditions in which forces could be separated and the parties could be held to their responsibilities under the agreement. Its purpose was to support restraint and coexistence without a return to organized violence. Even so, an armed force could secure aspects of the settlement without creating political trust or resolving every dispute over how Bosnia and Herzegovina would be governed.
Minsk also involved an international mission, but the OSCE monitors were unarmed civilians. They could observe and report violations; they could not separate the forces or compel compliance as IFOR was authorized to do under Dayton. Ukraine received international military assistance, but Minsk did not establish a multinational force to implement the ceasefire on the ground.
Nor can the Dayton framework simply be transferred to the conflict in Ukraine. Its armed implementation force mattered, but its presence alone does not explain the different outcomes. The political agreements, the parties to the conflicts, and the conditions under which each settlement was negotiated also differed.
A ceasefire without an international implementation force does not rest solely on an honour system. Monitoring, diplomacy, political pressure, and the costs of renewed fighting can all support restraint. Yet where the parties dispute the settlement itself, those supports may prove insufficient. Observation can make violations visible, but visibility alone cannot prevent them. The comparison between Minsk and Dayton therefore sharpens the question: what institutions, guarantees, and political commitments are needed to make restraint more durable than the opportunity to resume fighting?