How many times has Vladimir Putin broken ceasefire agreements with Ukraine?

Independent

12-03-2025

Donald Trump 's administration has taken a Ukrainian proposal for a 30-day truce with Russia to Vladimir Putin for consideration.
After months of Mr Trump blaming Ukraine for being the obstacle to peace despite Russia's sole role as the aggressor, Washington says the ball is now in Moscow's court.
Ukraine hopes this will show that it has always been Russia that is the one in the way of peace.
But even if Mr Putin agrees to a temporary truce, which is a big if, Ukraine and Europe are clear that Russia has a long history of breaking ceasefire agreements.
Mr Putin, they say, cannot be trusted, even if Mr Trump believes the Russian leader will respect his requests.
Last month, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky handed a document to Mr Trump's Ukraine envoy detailing what he said were the 25 ceasefires Russia has violated since the start of its aggression in 2014. That document was intended to be delivered to Mr Trump.
Below, we look at some of those agreements and how exactly these previous ceasefires broke down.
The Minsk Agreements
After pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 following the Euromaidan revolution, Mr Putin sent plainclothes Russian soldiers into the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and then into the eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Fighting quickly broke out as Russia denied involvement. Moscow claimed it was Ukrainian separatist forces.
Nonetheless, by September of that year, Ukraine, Russia and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR) convened for the first of what would be many peace talks. They were brokered by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
On 5 September, the first of two agreements was signed in the Belarusian capital of Minsk.
Its provisions included prisoner exchanges, the delivery of humanitarian aid and the withdrawal of heavy weapons.
But a day later, Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council announced that Russian troops had fired at Ukrainian positions at least 10 times. The ceasefire failed to materialise into anything substantive.
By the turn of the year, fighting had intensified. Pro-Russian insurgents attacked Ukrainian positions at Debaltseve, a transport hub near the administrative line between Donetsk and Luhansk, eventually forcing a Ukrainian withdrawal by mid-February.
At that point, a second agreement was underway in Minsk, this time overseen by German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande.
The agreement came into effect on 15 February but lasted only a few minutes, as Russian units fired on a Ukrainian checkpoint near Zolote in Luhansk Oblast, according to Ukraine's military.
For the next four years, Russia and Ukraine agreed to several ceasefires a year, often timed with Christmas, Easter or the harvest, around June/July.
Not a single one held for very long.
Zelensky's 2019 and 2020 attempts
It was just two months after the comedian-turned-politician Mr Zelensky assumed his role as the president of Ukraine that he found himself opposite Mr Putin for the latest round of peace talks.
Ms Merkel and the new French president Emmanuel Macron oversaw the talks.
In a written statement, the countries agreed to the release and exchange of all 'conflict-related detainees' by the end of 2019.
They also pledged to disengage military forces in three additional regions of Ukraine by the end of March 2020, without specifying which regions would be affected.
But it was a deal that was doomed to fail.
'We saw differences today,' Mr Macron admitted at the time. 'We didn't find the miracle solution, but we have advanced on it.'
The following July, another agreement was struck, one that did reduce the level of fighting but never quite stopped it completely.