It is starting to look like a pattern: After painstaking talks, the parties in the Ukraine conflict come to an agreement – only to have it fall apart or fail to be fully implemented. And confidence-building efforts aimed at resolving other post-Soviet conflicts do not offer much room for hope.
LONDON – It is starting to look like a pattern. After painstaking talks, the parties in the Ukraine conflict come to an agreement – only to have it fall apart or fail to be fully implemented. At least three separate deals to resolve the crisis have been struck, and each has quickly unraveled. Even a unanimous vote in the United Nations Security Council condemning the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and demanding access to the crash site has failed to produce the desired results. Over three months later, Dutch investigators have still not been able to conduct all necessary visits.
The usual diagnosis for the repeated failure to forge a lasting agreement is a lack of trust on both sides of the conflict, for which the usual prescription is to introduce a series of confidence-building measures. If only the Ukrainian national government in Kyiv, its Western allies, Russia, and the Ukrainian separatists could learn to trust each other, the thinking goes, perhaps a settlement could be reached.
But confidence-building measures are not the panacea that they are so often portrayed to be. To be sure, there are cases where the absence of trust-building efforts could partly explain why a conflict drags on. The 25-year tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh is a prime example. But there are also conflicts in which years of confidence-building measures have not only failed to produce a solution but have also prevented one from taking shape.
LONDON – It is starting to look like a pattern. After painstaking talks, the parties in the Ukraine conflict come to an agreement – only to have it fall apart or fail to be fully implemented. At least three separate deals to resolve the crisis have been struck, and each has quickly unraveled. Even a unanimous vote in the United Nations Security Council condemning the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and demanding access to the crash site has failed to produce the desired results. Over three months later, Dutch investigators have still not been able to conduct all necessary visits.
The usual diagnosis for the repeated failure to forge a lasting agreement is a lack of trust on both sides of the conflict, for which the usual prescription is to introduce a series of confidence-building measures. If only the Ukrainian national government in Kyiv, its Western allies, Russia, and the Ukrainian separatists could learn to trust each other, the thinking goes, perhaps a settlement could be reached.
But confidence-building measures are not the panacea that they are so often portrayed to be. To be sure, there are cases where the absence of trust-building efforts could partly explain why a conflict drags on. The 25-year tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh is a prime example. But there are also conflicts in which years of confidence-building measures have not only failed to produce a solution but have also prevented one from taking shape.