DER SPIEGEL | International Edition Europe | Politics | War & Peace 14 March 2020
’The War Is Over. Ukraine Is Not.‘
The Vienna Accords end six years of conflict on terms that give the Soviet Union the east, the south, and the symbolic heart of the country. What remains is smaller, poorer, and undefeated.
LVIV — Shortly before midnight on Thursday, in a ballroom of the Hofburg Palace that had hosted the Congress of Vienna two centuries earlier, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov signed their names to a document that neither man appeared to want to be photographed holding.
The Vienna Accords — forty-one pages of territorial demarcation, administrative protocols, civilian rights guarantees, and reconstruction financing commitments — formally ended the Ukraine War. The conflict began in April 2014 with the first armed clashes in the Donbas. It ends now, in March 2020, with a ceasefire line that runs along the Dnipro River from north of Kyiv southward through Zaporizhzhia, then east of Kherson to the Black Sea coast, encompassing Transnistria within the Soviet-administered zone.
The city of Kyiv, which sits on both banks of the river, will pass to Soviet civilian administration within sixty days under a special governance protocol. It will remain, under the Accords, an open city — no military installations, no Soviet garrison inside the city boundaries, a joint civilian monitoring commission with representation from the OSCE. Ukrainian citizens resident in Kyiv may remain or depart freely. Ukrainian cultural institutions, including the National Museum and the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, will operate under international cultural heritage protections.
In Lviv, where the Ukrainian government has operated in emergency relocation since January, President Mykhailo Kovalenko did not attend the signing. He issued a written statement at 11:47 p.m., twelve minutes before the signing ceremony concluded. It read, in full:
“Ukraine did not surrender tonight. Ukraine accepted a pause imposed by the exhaustion of those who promised to stand with us and did not. History will record what was lost here, and history will record who lost it. Ukraine endures.”
He did not mention the Accords by name. He did not congratulate his foreign minister. He has not appeared in public since.
How the Accords Were Reached
The Vienna process began in October 2019, six weeks after the collapse of the New Delhi summit, when German Chancellor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and French President Emmanuel Macron jointly approached the Austrian government about hosting a renewed mediation effort. The initiative was shaped, from the outset, by a frank private assessment shared among European foreign ministries that had not yet been stated publicly: that Ukraine could not recover the occupied territories by military means, that Western weapons deliveries had reached their structural ceiling, and that continued fighting would produce further Ukrainian territorial losses rather than reversals.
The assessment was not wrong. In the fourteen months between New Delhi and Vienna, the front line moved. Not significantly, and not quickly — but it moved east-to-west for the first time since 2017. Two Ukrainian brigades in the Zaporizhzhia salient were encircled and forced to withdraw in December 2019 in an operation that Ukrainian military briefers described as a “tactical redeployment” and that satellite imagery confirmed as a rout. The Kherson corridor, which Ukrainian forces had held since 2016, was cut in February 2020 by a Soviet armoured thrust that took forty-eight hours and cost the defenders approximately four thousand prisoners.
By the time the Kyiv government’s delegation arrived in Vienna on February 28th, their negotiating position had contracted to a single essential demand: that the Ukrainian state survive, with internationally recognised borders, a functioning government, and a credible path to Western economic integration. Everything else — Kyiv, the south, Transnistria, the eastern oblasts they had never recovered — had been conceded by events before it was conceded on paper.
The Soviet delegation, led again by Ryabkov, was described by European mediators as “businesslike.” They had waited six years. They did not need to hurry now.
What the Accords Contain
The territorial settlement establishes a new internationally recognised border running from the Belarusian frontier south along the Dnipro to the Black Sea. The Soviet Union assumes administrative authority over:
- The oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Mykolaiv in their entirety
- Crimea (already integrated into Soviet administrative structures since 2014)
- The city of Kyiv under the Special Governance Protocol
- Transnistria, formally separating from Moldova and absorbed into the Soviet administrative zone under a separate annex signed the same evening in Chișinău
The remaining Ukraine — comprising the oblasts of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Volyn, and Cherkasy, along with the western portions of Kyiv Oblast — will establish its provisional capital in Lviv. The EU has pledged a €240 billion reconstruction and integration package, the largest foreign assistance commitment in European history, conditional on the new Ukrainian state meeting democratic governance benchmarks over a five-year period. A fast-track EU membership candidacy process will open within six months.
Ukrainian citizens in Soviet-administered territories retain the right to Ukrainian citizenship, freedom of movement to remaining Ukrainian territory, and access to Ukrainian consular services. The Accords establish a joint claims commission to address property displacement cases. Human rights monitors from the Council of Europe will operate in Soviet-administered territories for a period of ten years, with access rights specified in an annex.
In Lviv
The city received the news in silence.
It has been the de facto seat of the Ukrainian government since January, when the cabinet relocated from Kyiv ahead of the final Soviet military advances in the south. In the weeks since, it has absorbed hundreds of thousands of internal refugees — from Kherson, from Zaporizhzhia, from the suburbs of Kyiv itself. The old city’s hotels are full. Families are sleeping in school gymnasiums. The queue outside the government’s emergency housing registration office stretches for two blocks.
Iryna Kovalchuk, thirty-one, a graphic designer from Kyiv who arrived in Lviv with her mother and seven-year-old son in February, heard the news on her phone while waiting in that queue. She did not cry. She said she had run out of things to feel.
“My apartment is on Shevchenko Boulevard,” she said. “On the west bank. So I suppose, technically, it is in the Soviet zone now. I haven’t been back to see it.” She paused. “I don’t know if I will go back.”
She was asked what she thought of the President’s statement.
“He’s right,” she said. “We didn’t surrender. But it doesn’t feel like anything else, either.”
The queue moved. She moved with it.
In Moscow
Soviet state television broadcast the signing ceremony live, with commentary that described the Accords as “a restoration of historical balance” and “the conclusion of a process begun by the illegal coup of 2014.” The Kremlin only issued a statement noting that the Soviet Union had “fulfilled its obligations to the populations of the east and south of Ukraine, who expressed their will clearly and whose security the Soviet government has now guaranteed.”
There were no celebrations in Red Square. The war had been won gradually, administratively, the way the Soviet state tends to win things — by outlasting the other side’s ability to sustain the cost.
What Was Lost
Six years. Estimates of total deaths range from 87,000 to 130,000 — military casualties on both sides, civilian deaths from artillery, displacement, and the infrastructure collapse that accompanied the fighting in the east. Approximately 3.4 million Ukrainians are displaced within the remaining Ukrainian territory or abroad. The Donbas industrial region, once Ukraine’s economic engine, has been fought over so thoroughly that much of its infrastructure will require complete reconstruction regardless of who administers it.
The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the golden-domed monastery complex that has stood since the eleventh century and that Ukrainian cultural organisations fought to include in the international heritage protections, is now inside the Soviet-administered zone. Its status under Soviet cultural governance will be watched closely.
The Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square, where the protests of 2014 began — is also inside that zone.
What Remains
The EU integration process will begin immediately. In Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the fast-track candidacy was “a commitment to the Ukrainian people and to the principle that borders cannot be changed by force — a principle that, even in a moment of compromise, we do not abandon.”
She did not explain how a fast-track membership process for a country that had just accepted Soviet-administered borders was consistent with that principle. The question was not asked.
In Lviv, the queue outside the housing office had not moved much by the time this correspondent left at two in the morning. The lights inside were still on. Officials were still working.
Ukraine endures. It is smaller than it was. It is not finished.
Markus Feldenkirchen is Der Spiegel’s chief political correspondent. Iryna Sawchuk reported from Lviv. Nikolaus Blome reported from Vienna. Translation assistance by Katarina Schulz. Editing by Barbara Hans.
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Related sources: TOI: New Delhi Summit Collapses (2019) | Reuters: China, North Korea Deploying Forces (2016) | NYT: Ukraine’s President Flees (2014) | Soviet Union | Ukraine | Mykhailo Kovalenko