Russia’s Long Record of Broken Pledges and Treaty Violations

During the February 28 meltdown in the Oval Office among President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump—claiming that he alone can bring peace to Ukraine, thereby ending the largest war in Europe since World War II—declared, “I think President Putin wants peace.” Earlier, when asked whether he trusts that Russia wants peace, Trump, seemingly based on publicly undisclosed conversations with the Russian dictator, said, “I do.” 

Zelensky, in the most polite and respectful way possible under the circumstances, had been trying to raise a fundamental issue about the Trump administration’s approach to reaching an agreement: Putin is fundamentally untrustworthy. His track record, both with regard to the war in Ukraine and more broadly with respect to previous agreements made with the United States, is consistent—he lies and cheats. And that is why Zelensky and Ukraine require substantive security guarantees that go beyond mere pieces of paper.

Putin’s previous broken pledges on Ukraine.

The premise that Ukraine is the party posing an inconvenient obstacle to peace because it insists that any agreement must be backed up by stronger guarantees ignores the history of Russia’s failure to respect the unbacked guarantees it had already agreed to.

In September 2014—in the wake of Russia’s illegal seizure of Crimea, its creation of irregular forces to take portions of the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and finally the insertion of regular Russian forces into those territories—the Ukrainian government, the Russian government, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) negotiated the Minsk Protocol and Accompanying Memorandum. Minsk I, as it came to be known, called for a ceasefire and prisoner exchanges. The fighting continued, however, with continued gains by both the Russian irregular and regular forces, and by January 2015 the agreement collapsed. Seeking to restore the peace, a Franco-German-led initiative resulted in a new agreement, dubbed Minsk II and again signed by representatives of the OSCE, Ukraine, and Russia, creating a second ceasefire. 

Russian forces proceeded to violate that agreement and, after taking additional territory, halted—leaving an uneasy truce in place. Finally, in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Minsk II no longer existed and then proceeded to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It was this sorry history to which Zelensky was trying to draw Trump’s and Vance’s attention during the Oval Office debacle—and in fact he had already provided U.S. negotiator Keith Kellogg with a list of some 25 Russian ceasefire violations since the 2014 destabilization of Ukraine. This tortured history, forgotten by most in the West, explains the Ukrainian position that any agreement must be backed by meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine.

This is even more the case since Putin’s violations of the Minsk agreements built upon his disregard of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which security assurances were provided by the U.S., U.K., France, and Russia when Ukraine gave up any claim to the nuclear weapons left on its soil after the breakup of the Soviet Union. 

The broader picture of Putin’s duplicity.

The United States has its own long historical record of negotiations with Russia, which can be summed up by Ambassador Charles “Chip” Bohlen’s famous axiom that the fundamental Russian negotiating stance is, “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.” The late Secretary of State George P. Shultz (for whom one of the authors worked as a junior diplomat) amended Bohlen’s adage by declaring that “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine too.”  

The Russian record of adherence to accords negotiated during or after the Cold War makes for depressing reading and underscores the necessity of vigilance and prudence when it comes to any effort to negotiate not just an end to the war in Ukraine but to any broader U.S.-Russian arms control or geopolitical agreements.

During the Cold War, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, along with the SALT I agreement, was regarded as the cornerstone of strategic stability, but the USSR was in violation of the treaty for years. Its construction of the Krasnoyarsk Radar contravened both the letter and spirit of the treaty because it was built not on the periphery of the country (for defensive purposes, allowable under the treaty) but in the center (for battle management). The Russians for years denied that the radar was a treaty violation before finally giving up in 1989 and dismantling it.  

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has violated or disregarded nine separate arms control agreements and treaties he either inherited or signed, including:

• The Helsinki Final Act of 1975, also known as the Helsinki Accords, wherein signatories pledged not to use military force to change borders in Europe
• The aforementioned Budapest Memorandum of 1994
• The Istanbul Document of 1999 (in which Russia pledged to withdraw its military forces from Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova)
• The Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991 and 1992 (in which Russia pledged to withdraw from active service various naval tactical nuclear weapons and to eliminate all ground-launched tactical nuclear weapons)
• The 1992 Open Skies Treaty (in which Russia blocked U.S. access to parts of Russia clearly provided for under the treaty and also deviated from agreed flight paths over the U.S. that were mandated by the treaty) 
• The 1999 Vienna Document (Russia falsified and concealed military exercise information which it had agreed to provide)
• The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Agreement (which Russia violated by covertly developing and then deploying a  missile which exceeded the permissible range limits established by the treaty
• The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention banning retention of chemical warfare agents, and
• The 2011 New START Treaty (Russia has withdrawn from participation in treaty-mandated working groups and inspections)

Additionally, Russia is almost certainly violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention by maintaining an active bioweapons capability.

Russia also routinely violates the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement and the 1989 Dangerous Military Activities Agreement, including buzzing the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea and unsafe approaches to U.S. aircraft operating in the Black Sea. Recent revelations of intelligence suggesting that Russia might be prepared to violate the Outer Space Treaty by putting a nuclear weapon into orbit are yet another indication of Moscow’s contempt for solemn international obligations.  

Given this deliberate and well-documented track record, the bar for holding Moscow accountable for its actions under any agreement it might sign regarding Ukraine’s future, much less the kinds of nuclear arms control agreements in which President Trump has also shown an interest, should be exceedingly high. Indeed, the first Trump administration demonstrated it would check Russian bad behavior when it removed any constraint that the INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty imposed on the U.S. after Putin had gutted those pacts. The second Trump administration would do well to review the policies it pursued during the first term in office when it understood those dangers.

Would Putin tolerate a Western-oriented, independent Ukraine?

Putin may well seek to convince Trump he “wants peace.” The question is, what sort of peace does he seek? Some Americans are convinced he would accept an independent, democratic Ukrainian state. But that hope-inspired approach surely misreads Putin’s willingness to countenance an end to the conflict on any terms other than capitulation. 

As former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Richard Shirreff recently told the BBC’s Ukrainecast, “What Russia is about is removing Ukraine from the map as a sovereign state. … Because that’s deep in the Russian DNA. And I think any American negotiator who doesn’t understand that and thinks there can be a durable, lasting solution with a sovereign Ukraine, and that Russia will accept that, is deluding themselves.” Russian official statements since last month’s talks in Saudi Arabia have validated Shirreff’s judgments. Putin’s representatives have and continue to indicate they will not make any concessions that allow the continued existence of an independent Ukraine tied to the West and have stressed that any settlement must resolve the alleged “root causes” of the conflict (code for preventing a sovereign Ukraine from choosing its own geopolitical orientation). They specifically demanded an explicit reversal of the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit Declaration welcoming Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to join the alliance at some future date. As a result, short of a total surrender to Putin’s position—something no American president or Ukrainian president or NATO ally should accept—the prospects for a lasting, negotiated peace, are quite remote, as President Zelensky recently noted.

If Moscow really does want peace, as Trump claims, it faces two substantial challenges—to actually negotiate in good faith and to abide by what is eventually agreed to. Russia’s lamentable history of noncompliance shows that either one, let alone both, might be impossible for Vladimir Putin.