Compliance with negotiated military dispute settlement: A procedural dilemma for conflict resolution between Russia and Ukraine

This article integrates two strands of game-theoretical literature, one on delegated bargaining and the other on compliance, to explain the failure of the two key military dispute-settlement agreements between Russia and Ukraine. While both strands of literature analyze principal–agent problems, they reach contrasting conclusions about the role of transparency and the public’s role in securing agreements and ensuring compliance. We reconcile these perspectives by distinguishing analytically between agreement and compliance efficiency. Although closed-door delegated bargaining can improve the efficiency of reaching an agreement, we demonstrate that the efficiency of compliance hinges crucially on the level of public trust in the delegate. This implies that public mistrust of Ukraine’s delegate in the Minsk negotiations undermined compliance with the two Minsk agreements. Nonetheless, our simulation results also show that effective compliance is still attainable: even an agreement with only moderate efficiency can be upheld provided that public trust in the delegate is not too low.