Multinational Security Guarantee Agreement for the Russia-Ukraine War

Other ceasefire agreements fail to account for the initial lack of trust between parties. They prioritize obtaining initial signatures for the agreement in the expectation that trust will be built through continued negotiations. This framework instead chooses to build trust in the agreement before the trust necessary for negotiations has been built. This framework departs from prior frameworks in several main ways: First, most mechanisms of the agreement are conditional, with some being automatic. This incentivizes parties to work with the agreement as it progresses and builds trust gradually as they do so. Second, monitoring and verification are run through a centralized body. This gives the agreement credibility. Third, the framework uses a multinational security guarantee agreement (MSGA) for protection of Ukraine. Fourth, the framework makes use of public commitment signaling to change the expected responses of parties based on the information they are given by other parties (such as public joint training missions under the MSGA to show commitment to the agreement to other parties). These changes allow cooperation with the agreement even when trust is low: the incentives to exploit the agreement in the early stages are reduced, and the trust needed for continued negotiations builds as the parties of the agreement work together.