Mariya Heletiy
Following the 2024 US presidential elections, President Donald Trump prioritized peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia as a key foreign policy objective. The peace talks that followed led Putin to declare a brief “Easter truce” that he summarily broke, echoing Russia’s repeated violations of the 2019 ceasefire agreement and highlighting its broader challenge to Europe and the post–World War II international order.
These recent ceasefire violations underscore a critical lesson: in today’s conflicts, where the lines between conventional and irregular warfare are blurred, durable peace cannot be achieved through formal negotiations and traditional diplomacy alone. The Russia-Ukraine war is not just a conventional military conflict, but a struggle playing out across diplomatic, informational, economic, humanitarian and military dimensions.
As with all irregular wars, legitimacy and perception are at the center of the struggle. Russia seeks not only territorial gains but also to delegitimize Ukraine’s sovereignty and erode Western unity. Accordingly,
securing peace in Ukraine demands more than conventional negotiations. Instead, it requires a comprehensive irregular warfare strategy attuned to the conflict’s complex dynamics, much like the successful approaches used in the Balkans in the 1990s which integrated military deterrence, legal accountability, information dominance, civil resilience, and international governance mechanisms.
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