The “Ghost of Minsk” in the Discursive Framing of a Negotiated Outcome to the Full-Scale Russia–Ukraine War (2022–August 2025)

The article examines how the legacy of the Minsk Peace Process (MPP) (2014–22) has been invoked in official and expert discourses in Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany, as well as in the official discourse of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in debates on peace negotiations and settlement options during the first three and a half years of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. It shows that, notwithstanding differences in discourse production contexts, the MPP has remained an influential point of reference for all negotiation participants, as they utilize the lessons they claim to have learned to support their positions in the new conflict and negotiation setting. Beyond its novel empirical focus on the discursive use of the MPP legacy, the article makes two conceptual contributions. First, informed by the concept of legacy and its discursive instrumentalization, it shows that even when negotiations collapse, past negotiations and processes continue to be utilized by conflict parties and mediators in new conflict and negotiation settings. Second, it offers a classification of the discursive lessons that parties and mediators claim to draw across four perspectives on peace processes—bargaining, process design (institutional), relational, and normative—and highlights the logical connections among them. Taken together, these insights underscore the importance for actors engaged in peace processes of recognizing how the legacies of previous negotiations and the (non-)implementation of peace deals serve as discursive tools that may influence negotiation dynamics and settlement options in new conflict and/or negotiation settings.