The Donbas Deadlock: "Minsk II" at Five Years

Bringing peace, security, and political stability to the war-torn region of Donbas has proven to be a difficult and time-consuming task. Since its outbreak in April 2014, the armed conflict in the east Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk has claimed more than 13,000 lives and displaced more than 1.5 million people. The "Minsk II" agreement, signed in February 2015, was supposed to put an end to the armed hostilities, resolve the underlying political issues, and gradually restore Ukrainian government control of the country's eastern border. Today - five years later - it can be noted that none of this has happened. Ceasefire violations are still frequent and the number of casualties continues to grow. Progress in the implementation of the peace plan signed in Minsk has been slow, also after the much-anticipated Paris summit of the "Normandy Four" (Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and France) in December 2019. How did this conflict arise? What kind of a conflict is it? What role does Russia play in it? And why has it been so difficult to bring the conflict to an end?