Ukraine and the Limits of Mediation

This article examines the limited effectiveness of mediation in high-intensity interstate conflicts, using the ongoing war in Ukraine as a case study. While mediation has proven useful in intrastate and post-conflict scenarios, it faces unique structural, strategic, and normative challenges in other contexts. The paper explores why third-party efforts have failed to de-escalate the Ukraine-Russia conflict and ultimately considers whether a rethinking of mediation frameworks is needed for better results in future interstate conflicts.

Keywords

Ukraine, Russia, mediation, conflict resolution, diplomacy, peace process, success, failure

Introduction

Mediation has long stood as one of the most vital instruments in the diplomatic toolkit for managing and resolving armed conflict. From the Camp David Accords to the Dayton Agreement, its legacy suggests that even the most protracted disputes can, under the right conditions, be brought to the negotiating table. Yet not all wars are equally receptive to mediation. High-intensity conflicts, especially those involving major power rivalries, existential stakes, and geopolitical entanglements, pose unique challenges that often render traditional mediation ineffective. The ongoing war in Ukraine is a striking example.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the international community has launched a series of mediation efforts, both formal and informal. From the Minsk and Istanbul talks to recent summits in Saudi Arabia, and initiatives by the United Nations, Turkey, China, and the African Union, none have produced sustainable outcomes. Peace remains certainly distant, while the conflict’s military, political, and symbolic stakes continue to escalate. Mediation, despite its normative appeal, has been sidelined by a combination of irreconcilable war objectives, entrenched distrust, perceived bias of potential mediators, and the absence of mutually hurting stalemates.

The relatively recent return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency adds a revealing dimension to the broader failure of diplomacy. Promising a swift end to the war and invoking his personal rapport with Vladimir Putin, Trump has projected himself as a dealmaker uniquely capable of brokering peace. However, his administration has so far delivered only sharp deadlines, vague threats of expanded sanctions, and public clashes with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. No direct talks with either side have taken place, and Trump’s polarizing presence may be further eroding trust in Western-led mediation. Yet his approach, highly personalistic, coercive, and transactional, serves less as a game-changer than a mirror reflecting the deeper structural dysfunctions of international peace-making today.

This article argues that the failure of mediation in Ukraine is not simply the result of diplomatic missteps or timing errors, but a symptom of systemic constraints that afflict high-intensity interstate conflicts. These constraints include power asymmetries between the parties, highly imperfect information, incompatible war goals, framing of the conflict as existential, the collapse of credible neutrality among mediators, and the geopolitical instrumentalization of peace efforts themselves. By situating Ukraine within a broader theoretical and comparative context, and by examining the implications of recent developments, the paper offers a critical assessment of whether current mediation frameworks are fit for purpose in the contemporary security environment.

Identifying success and failure

Mediation is broadly defined as a form of third-party intervention aimed at facilitating negotiation between two or more parties in conflict. Unlike arbitration, negotiation or adjudication, mediation is non-binding, voluntary, and heavily dependent on the perceived legitimacy and strategic utility of the mediator. Its flexibility makes it attractive in both intra and interstate disputes, but this same characteristic also reveals its limitations, particularly when applied to wars between sovereign states with high stakes, high casualties, and deeply entrenched geopolitical dynamics.

When is mediation successful? Scholarly research, especially the work of Jacob Bercovitch and Richard Jackson (2009), has identified four primary variables that shape the success or failure of international mediation: (1) the identity and characteristics of the conflict parties; (2) the nature of the dispute itself; (3) the identity and credibility of the mediator; and (4) the broader political and international context. All these elements are crucial, determining “the nature, quality, and effectiveness of the mediation and indicate why some efforts at mediation succeed while others fail” (Bercovitch & Jackson, 2009:34). When any of these are unfavourable, the prospects for successful mediation diminish considerably.

Parties in Conflict

Bercovitch and Jackson (2009) emphasize that effective mediation is highly contingent on the legitimacy and internal cohesion of the conflicting parties. Mediation requires that each party is represented by actors with clear authority, unified political backing, and international recognition. As Bercovitch (2009) notes, “mediation has a better chance of success when theadversaries are recognized as the legitimate spokesmen for their parties”. This insight helps to explain why mediation has historically mediation has struggled in places like Lebanon, Sudan, or Cyprus – where internal disunity or competing claims to authority undermined the credibility of negotiations. While Ukraine and Russia both possess clearly defined state leadership, the legitimacy question nonetheless re-emerges in Ukraine due to Russia’s repeated denial of Ukrainian sovereignty, its support for separatist proxies, and its framing of the Ukrainian government as illegitimate and “neo-Nazi-controlled” (BBC News, 2023; Treisman, 2022; EUvsDisinfo, 2025). Earlier this year, even the US presidency has not doubted to label the government of Zelensky in Ukraine a dictatorship (Howard, 2025; Sauer & Harding, 2025). Such narratives, not just coming from one of the belligerents but also from one of the main mediators, obscure the basic premise of mediation: that two recognised and sovereign state parties can negotiate as equals and guided by an impartial third-party.

The Dispute

While the structure and identity of the actors involved are critical to understanding mediation outcomes, a second, and perhaps more decisive, factor is the nature of the dispute itself. When a conflict centres on issues perceived as existential, such as compromising sovereignty, territorial integrity, or regime survival, mediation efforts are significantly less likely to succeed. These are what William Zartman (2008) refers to as “intractable issues” and what others like Mervin Ott (1972) and Robert Randle (1973) have framed as “non-negotiable interests”. The war in Ukraine presents precisely the kind of high-stake, zero-sum conflict that renders traditional mediation structurally ineffective. For Ukraine, the war is not merely a geopolitical dispute, but an existential struggle for national survival, political independence and unity, and democratic self-determination. For Russia, it is framed as a civilizational confrontation indirectly with the West and a strategic campaign to reassert dominance in its perceived sphere of influence.

Marieke Klaiboer (1996) in her work Understanding Success and Failure of International Mediation guides us through the main elements of a dispute that determine mediation’s outcomes. First, she identifies the problem of conflict ripeness – the idea that conflicts go through a life cycle, and that mediation is more or less likely to be effective at certain phases. Some scholars suggest that mediation is more effective in later stages of conflict when reaching a state of emergency, when the costs of war have escalated, battlefield optimism has faded, and parties reassess their goals. Yet in the Ukraine war, this threshold has arguably not been reached. Russia continues to perceive strategic and tactical value in prolonging the conflict, believing that Western unity may fray, fatigue increase, and further territorial gains remain possible. Meanwhile, Ukraine has benefited considerable from Western support and maintains realistic hopes of reversing Russian advances. Others argue that mediation is best persued best in the early stages, before violence escalates and positions harden. But this window never truly existed. The 2022 war began with a full-scale invasion predicated on regime change, under the assumption of a rapid fall of Kyiv. Russia’s early conviction and maximalist objectives foreclosed early diplomatic options. Still other suggest that ripeness is not about time, but about key events, such as mutually hurting stalemates or radical shifts in power relations that force a strategic rethink. Neither has yet occurred. While Ukraine has mounted successful counteroffensives and even ventured into Russian territory, and Russia has endured significant attrition and sanctions, neither side perceives itself as losing outright.

Second, another insight from Klaiboer (1996) is conflict intensity and its divergent logics. Contrary to simplistic assumptions, intensity can push parties towards or away from negotiation depending on their position. For Russia, being the stronger party, high-intensity conflict may reinforce optimism and forcefully lead to “victory thinking”, especially when considering that losing may not just mean to lose the conflict but highly like also the collapse of Putin’s regime and his grip on power. For Ukraine the same conflict might encourage negotiation, especially when civilian costs and social exhaustion mount. But this assumes that negotiation offers a meaningful path forward. For Ukraine, the prospects of territorial concessions, neutrality and legitimizing Russian’s annexations are not just politically unacceptable, but also strategically suicidal. As a result, both logics work against the pull of mediation.

Third, the intensity of violence cannot be separated from the substance of the dispute. The war in Ukraine focuses on issues highly dividing and challenging to settle: issues on sovereignty involving incompatible territorial aims, ideological issues on the nature of national political systems, beliefs and core values, security issues concerning borders, frontiers, and territories, and self-determination and nationhood issues. All these matters at stake make of the war a paradigmatic case of a structurally resistant conflict, where mediation is not just difficult – it may be even fundamentally misaligned with the logic of the conflict itself.

The Mediator

A third determinant factor for mediation is the identity and attributes of the mediator. While it is tempting to assume that any well-intentioned third party can play a constructiverole, literature shows that effective mediation lingers on an interplay of three core factors: impartiality, leverage, and status (Kleiboer, 1996).

On one side, conventional wisdom holds that the success of a mediator depends on their perceived impartiality. It tends to follow a logic where impartiality breeds confidence, which fosters acceptability, in turn increasing the likelihood of success. Impartiality is less about objective neutrality than perception: parties must believe the mediator has no hidden agenda and is equally invested in a fair resolution. In Ukraine, very few mediators have managed to meet this threshold. The US and EU are widely seen, from the Russian part, more as partisan players rather than neutral brokers. Ukraine, meanwhile, is equally suspicious of the actors perceived too close to their enemy, such as China, which has maintained a careful rhetorical neutrality while deepening economic ties with Moscow. On the other side, it is believed that a degree of bias can be useful. A mediator with strong ties to one party, particularly the more powerful one, may be more capable of persuading that actor to make concessions. Nevertheless, this kind of biased mediation advantage suggests that while the most determinant mediators, such as the US and EU, have the capacity to influence Ukraine and its position, they have a complete lack of access to or trust with Moscow, rendering any influence over Russia practically non-existent.

Another key factor is leverage, understood as the mediator’s ability to shape the parties’ behaviour through incentives or pressure. Without leverage, even the most neutral mediator is little more than a facilitator; with it, a mediator can tilt calculations and create meaningful costs of benefits for accepting a settlement. But the conflict in Ukraine seems to have revealed a dual paradox. The US and EU possess considerable leverage, particularly over Ukraine, given that they provide the bulk of Kyiv’s military and economic support, but this leverage has proven politically and diplomatically fraught: any signal that the West is pressuring Ukraine towards negotiations can be interpreted as abandonment, embolden Russia, and fracture Western unity.

On the Russian side, these same actors have no leverage at all – sanctions, international isolation, and ICC warrants have closed off diplomatic channels and hardened Kremlin resistance. Conversely, middle-power actors like Brazil, India, Turkey and South Africa have attempted to fill the gap, seeing it as “an opportunity to increase their status in a changing world order” (Friedrich, 2025). But their lack of military, economic, or institutional weight has made their proposals look more symbolic than strategic.

Lastly, a mediator’s status shapes their ability to convene talks and drive outcomes. High-status mediators have struggled with credibility, while low-status actors have struggled with access. The UN has repeatedly called for peace, but its credibility has been underminedby internal divisions and its Security Council paralysis. Religious and humanitarian actors such as the Vatican or Red Cross enjoy moral authority yet they have not been entrusted with a political mandate. Meanwhile low- to mid- powers like Saudi Arabia or Turkey have hosted talks but their status is too ambiguos to transform diplomacy into solid commitments.

International Context

Mediation efforts do not unfold in a vacuum, and they are embedded within a broader international context that can influence a specific conflict. This context includes the external involvement of third parties and the impact of current global conflicts. Regarding the former one, we see how the war in Ukraine has been internationalized to a very high degree, each with their own interests and strategic calculations; these actors do not simply support or oppose mediation, they often seek to steer its outcomes. The US and EU have rhetorically endorsed peace, simultaneously calling for negotiation while intensifying military aid to Ukraine and deepening sanctions against Russia. Moscow, for its part, has used mediation efforts from Global South countries to push a narrative of Western hypocrisy and legitimize its own version of the conflict. On the latter one, the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza initiated in 2023 has certainly caused impact on effective mediation by diverting international attention, political capital, and diplomatic bandwidth (Fischer, 2023). It has hardened divisions between Western and non-western states, exposed the selective application of international norms, and weakened the moral authority of the same predominant actors in Ukraine.

Prospects for Constructive Mediation

The failure of mediation in Ukraine does not imply that peace efforts should be abandoned but rather that they must be rethought. Any future initiative must grapple with the structural constraints of the conflict. And while there is no quick fix, there are some possible strategic adjustments that may improve the prospects for meaningful mediation.

Mediation cannot be forced where no basic readiness exists. As of now, neither Russia nor Ukraine appear to perceive the situation as unsustainable enough as to warrant real concessions. Ukraine, buoyed by external support and resistance morale, continues to prioritize territorial integrity; Russia, although facing attrition, shows no sign of internal collapse or strategic retreat. Yet this state will not persist forever. Mediation actors must prepare now for a future moment of ripeness, through discreet channels of communication, track-two diplomacy, and the careful cultivation of relationships with intermediaries who are perceived as neither partisans nor lacking strength.Additionally, no single state or institution holds both the legitimacy and leverage required to mediate the war effectively. One possible solution might be to construct a multilateral mediation group, a consortium that includes regional powers from both camps (e.g., Turkey, India, Brazil, China), paired with neutral international organizations such as the OSCE or an UN-appointed envoy. This hybrid format would help offset perceived bias, while allowing each actor to bring different types of influence (diplomatic, symbolic, economic). While past attempts at such inclusive formats (in Geneva or Jeddah) have faltered, a renewed attempt could succeed if accompanied by real confidence-building measures. The goal cannot be a grand bargain overnight, but rather incremental progress, such as humanitarian agreements, local ceasefires, or more mechanisms for POW exchanges.

Furthermore, rather than aiming immediately for a comprehensive peace deal, at the moment mediation should pursue limited but strategic goals easier to achieve and politically less costly for the parts. These might include demilitarized humanitarian corridors, nuclear safety agreements, grain export frameworks, monitoring mechanisms for violations of the laws ruling conflict. Such issue-based mediation offers two advantages: first, it creates channels for communication and cooperation even amid ongoing violence. Second, it can build the trust and institutional scaffolding needed for more substantive negotiations. Small steps, if consistently successful, can shift the logic of the conflict away from zero-sum towards political transformation.

Conclusion

The war in Ukraine has laid bare the limits of international mediation in the face of entrenched geopolitical interests, high-stakes territorial disputes, and a global order marked by fragmentation and normative inconsistency. This article has helped, through theoretical insights, to clarify why mediation has struggled to gain traction. Crucially, Ukraine is not merely a war between two states but one deeply embedded in the ideological and strategic rift between the West and a resurgent bloc of non-Western actors; mediation in such a context is not only about stopping bullets or drawing borders – it is about fundamental questions of global power, legitimacy and security.

Yet, this should not lead to fatalism. Instead, the war should serve as a stress test for the theory and practice of mediation. It encourages for more flexible, multipolar, and long-term approaches that recognize the complexity of modern conflicts. Ripeness cannot be imposed, but it can be guided, anticipated and prepared for. Mediators may not be impartial, but they can still be effective if they bring influence, coordination, and creativity to the table. In this light,the challenge is not to revive old mediation models, but to rethink diplomacy itself – more adaptive, plural, and better equipped to navigate the fractured realities of contemporary war.

While a comprehensive and just peace may remain a distant prospect, a serious diplomatic thinking must begin to coalesce around that a minimally viable settlement could look like – one that does not reward aggression but recognizes the strategic realities on the ground and the need to prevent prolonged devastation. Given Russia’s effective occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine, one plausible scenario is a negotiated agreement that formalizes Moscow’s control over these territories, especially the Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea regions – with the potential inclusion of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as well. This, in turn, would almost certainly require significant concessions from Ukraine, which, to be politically and strategically acceptable, would demand powerful counterbalancing guarantees from the international community.

For Kyiv, any territorial compromise, however limited, would only be viable if paired with long-term security and integration guarantees. Chief among these would be European Union membership, providing institutional, financial, and political anchoring to Ukraine’s sovereignty and democracy. NATO membership, while more contentious given Russian red lines, may be considered as a long-term objective or at least a structured bilateral security guarantee, akin to Article 5-type commitments, negotiated with allies. Such arrangements would not only signal Western resolve, but provide tangible deterrence against future incursions, and avoid risking a mere pause in hostilities, such as it happened after 2014. The role of the global community is therefore not to impose a blueprint, but to cultivate the political conditions under which compromise becomes possible. That entails shifting from reactive, fragmented diplomacy to sustained, multilateral engagement that includes emerging actors (e.g., India, Brazil, Turkey) who may lack leverage but offer neutrality and legitimacy. International mediators have found it especially difficult to reach ideal solutions, therefore is necessary to start building a security architecture that can contain conflict, institutionalize restraint, and allow diplomacy to take root.

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