 Good morning. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the executive vice president here at the United States Institute of Peace. I'm very glad to have you all here. We've been looking forward to this conversation for some time. Institute of Peace focuses on conflict. We were established in 1984 and focused on violent conflict around the world. We do a whole lot of work in Iraq and have an office there and in Afghanistan have an office there in Tunisia and have an office there. Violent conflict has not been part of the European situation environment until recently. And so we haven't done a whole lot in this. And frankly, it's good that the East Europe and Europe and broadly has been peaceful. Well, it's not now. And it hasn't been since for the last three years. And we have to go back to the Balkans time, to the 90s, for lessons and information and ideas about how this can work. So the Institute of Peace has been looking for those kinds of connections. And today's discussion pulls those two together. Ambassador Bardu is going to talk to you about his book, his experience, his understanding of how the Balkans worked out. But he's also got in mind the conflict today, the conflict in Ukraine. He has in mind the aggression of the Russians against Ukraine, illegally occupying Crimea and stirring up and leading the conflict, the war, in the eastern part of Ukraine. So the focus first on the Balkans, but recognizing that where we're going with this is the current policy, is the current issue, is the current fight, is the current war. So that's the theme here for today. It's great to have this group here, not just this group here, but folks in the audience. Do we have ambassadors? Do we have German ambassadors and others around here? It's great. We have people from across the street. John, welcome. And Oris, to come out of retirement. This is all good. This is a great thing, Chris. Good to have you here. So this is a great group. Looking forward to this conversation. And to lead this conversation, my colleague Charles North. Charles, we have borrowed from USAID, where he has and continues to have a 30-year career at aid. His qualifications go back, as I say, many years. But he was in Moscow for seven years. And for the last three years of those seven, he was the USAID mission director and has the honor of being kicked out of Moscow. So that's a great qualification, we think, for his work. So he's senior advisor here at USIP on Ukraine and Russia. And I'm very pleased to hand this over to Charles. Great. Thank you so much, Bill. Thank you all so much for being here today. I will apologize at the beginning for my voice. I simply will hold out. If not, I'll ask someone else to step in. But it is great to see you all here. As Bill said, we have two panels. We're starting first with one on the Balkans, and then we'll go to a group focusing, even more so, on Ukraine. We've asked both panels to look at four kind of statements in a framework of how we're about to be thinking about the issues. First, on leverage. What leverage was or is available to bring parties to agreement? What is the agreement? What were or should be the essential ingredients of an effective agreement? And then on to implementation. What were or will be the challenges of implementing peace agreements? And finally, the issue of corruption. How important is that to the peace process? Is peace possible with high levels of corruption? So these are four of the themes we'll be looking at in both panels. And so before we get started, let me just introduce the first panel. And James Pardue is first, he is an author. He is the author of Peacemakers, American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans. He was at the heart of U.S. national policymaking throughout the humanitarian crises in the Balkans from Richard Holbrooks and negotiations on Bosnia in 1995 until the independence of Kosovo in 2008. He was the primary U.S. negotiator of the Orated Agreement in Macedonia and he was ambassador to Bulgaria from 2002 to 2005. Jim is joined by Michael Haltzel who has been a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He's been there since 2006. He came to Johns Hopkins University after a long career in public service capped by his tenure from 1994 to 2005 as Democratic staff director of the subcommittee on European Affairs of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as senior foreign policy advisor to then Senator Joe Biden. So with that, let me turn it over to you, Jim, for your thoughts on the lessons from the Balkans and where we should be thinking about going forward. Let's see, there we go, there, yeah, okay, there we go. Okay, thank you, Charles. My presentation this morning is drawn from my book which is shamelessly promoted on this particular slide. The wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were the deadliest conflicts in Europe since World War II and produced a level of genocide in Europe not seen since the Holocaust and estimated 110,000 people lost their lives and over three million became refugees or homeless. After a reluctant start, the U.S.-led international intervention in the Balkans that began in 1995 produced a major foreign policy success for the United States. It stopped a war in Bosnia that included genocide and crimes against humanity. It ended a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo and it prevented a civil war in Macedonia. Overall, it restored peace and stability to about 40 million people in the region and working very closely with the European Contact Group, the Balkan Engagement Reestablished American Leadership on a critical security issue in Europe. But Bosnia was also the high-water mark of U.S.-Russian relations in the early post-Soviet period. The breakup of Yugoslavia also transformed several international organizations. NATO was converted from a Cold War organization focused on the central Europe to a modern alliance capable of expanding its partnerships and operating outside the central region of Europe. The Balkan experience also changed the European Union. The EU established during this Balkan period a foreign policy identity by appointing a high representative for common security and foreign policy and an organization to support it. The EU engaged in development activities in Bosnia and Kosovo deployed security forces to replace NATO and Bosnia. And along with the United States negotiated the OCRID agreement that Charles mentioned. After Dayton, the UN recovered from the disastrous unperformed period in Bosnia. The UN governed Kosovo for eight years and the UN negotiations set the stage for Kosovo's independence in 2008. The UN's international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted 161 people and convicted 80 of them for genocide and crimes against humanity. Now today, the Balkan region is at peace and seven new nations are generally oriented toward democracy, EU and NATO membership. However, as we all know, there are serious issues remaining, serious developmental problems and the process in fact may take generations to complete. Can't see my slide, but I hope it's right. Here, yeah, again, right here. The three distinct crises and the breakup for Yugoslavia provide examples that may be useful to a discussion of the Ukraine. There are obviously great strategic differences between the Balkans and the Ukraine. Russia's not Serbia, the Ukraine is not Bosnia. But there are some similarities that I'd like to mention. First of all, Moscow's fantasy that Russian troops were not involved in the conflict is a kind of a less credible version of the fantasy that most of it spun in denying that Belgrade provided no military support to Bosnian Serbs. The acceptance of unarmed OSCE observers in the Donbas looks to me a lot like the Kosovo verification mission. The proposal to consider weak UN peacekeeping structure focuses diplomatic attention away from the real issues and looks like a clone in the Ukraine of a disastrous unperforming Bosnia. We should also be wary of the Republic of Serbska model in Bosnia. Now, again, the Donbas Eastern Ukraine is not the Republic of Serbska. There are many differences. But because the leaders that are driving the Ukraine policy today are very experienced veterans of the Bosnian negotiations and in dealing with the United States through the contact group. I expect that ultimately Moscow will seek to create some form of pro-Russian political entity in Eastern Ukraine as a poison pill with the goal of paralyzing the Ukrainian government on any decisions that Moscow does not like. Now for some comments on leverage and agreement. All peace agreements are the products of leverage and will. And in Bosnia, Holbrook had a lot of leverage. Economic sanctions are slow, but they worked. And Milosevic in 1995 was fairly desperate that he get some kind of economic sanctions relief. Naming corrupt cronies and denying them travel was also a significant influence on Belgrade. We shouldn't underestimate the power of this kind of pressure on leaders in Russia. NATO airstrikes on Serbian heavy weapons, Croat Muslim offensive in Western Balkans also put serious military pressure on Belgrade. The Croatian leaders saw a path in their negotiations to solving the issue of Eastern Slavonia and occurring favor with the United States and the EU for the future. The Muslims simply wanted the killing to stop and to get national recognition for their government in some form. But the U.S. also used agreed to train and equip the Bosnian Federation military to assist in their future security to motivate them to sign the date and agreement. In Macedonia, non-military leverage on the parties was significant. The Albanians wanted more recognition of their heritage and greater influence in local and national governmental institutions. The ethnic Macedonians wanted to retain the unity of their nation. They also knew that EU and NATO would not accept another episode of ethnic repression in the Balkans. And their future relationship with the EU and the United States was also at stake in these negotiations. In Kosovo, aggressive high-level diplomacy failed. I met with Milosevic in December 1998 and again in January 1999. He would not face the historical and political penalties of losing Kosovo. And he had no will to reach a diplomatic settlement. So I became convinced that he was resigned to war with NATO and only a 78-day air campaign expelled Serbian forces from Kosovo. I see a parallel between the Milosevic attitude on Kosovo and Putin's commitment to the Ukraine. Like Serbian nationalism, Russia's historic relationship with Ukraine is deep and Putin plays nationalism for his own personal political advantage. Agreeing to a settlement that might allow the Ukraine to align itself with the West would be extremely difficult for Putin or any nationalist Russian leader. In the Ukraine, the employment of NATO and EU military forces that were so important in the Balkans are obviously too provocative and not feasible. But supplying lethal defensive weapons to Kyiv makes an important statement. And some form of Western military training for the Ukraine forces might be another level of assistance to consider. In my experience, it was rare for an agreement to bubble up from the parties of the negotiations. Instead, activist diplomacy explored the issues with the parties, then pushed the process with very specific proposals and potential agreements. Successful agreements are rarely statements of principle, even though political leaders often prefer to accept general principles without details. Real agreements need specific laws, actions, and detailed commitments and timelines to be valid. The rest of my personal lessons relates to corruption. For the military assistance program that I ran in Bosnia, we operated under very extensive rules to ensure that donor funding was managed in a way that would avoid corruption. It was tough, it was arduous, and it was sometimes cumbersome. But I'm now convinced that such practices should apply to every foreign assistance effort. We know from painful experiences in Vietnam, in Iraq, and Afghanistan that corruption makes a mockery of the rule of law and of democratic values in general. My impression, although I'm certainly no expert, is that corruption is rampant in the Ukraine and they are doing little to restrict it. International assistance to the Ukraine should take every measure to ensure that at least for our programs, resources will not be squandered or stolen by corrupt officials. This is possible if the right practices are put in place and they are enforced. The period of American leadership in the Balkans was a high point of US global leadership in the post-Soviet period. American leadership in the Balkans was based on democratic and humanitarian values and US interests. It focused on close cooperation with strong European allies and international institutions. Diplomacy led the way, but appropriate military force was used when required. For most of the period, the breakup of Yugoslavia was at the top of the American foreign policy agenda and had the full attention of the White House and the Secretary of State. As we discuss the Balkan experience, we have to consider the status of American influence in the world today. The overall capabilities of our diplomatic core and the priority of Ukraine and US national policy. I want to emphasize that the American policy that prevailed in the former Yugoslavia was the polar opposite of the Trump foreign and national security policy that we see today. This morning I joined other foreign policy and national security professionals who are sounding the alarm about the decline of US influence abroad. As a former US special envoy, I am particularly concerned about the current administration's contempt for democracy and the extreme cuts in the diplomatic capability of the State Department and the US foreign service. And I say this as someone who is not a foreign service officer, but is someone with a military background who worked with them closely for over a decade. This is a very tough international environment for any US diplomat representing the US abroad today. And I think it is particularly difficult as we consider effective policy toward issues as important as the Russian aggression in the Ukraine. Thank you very much for your attention. So let me now turn it over to Mike for your observations. Thank you, Charles. Before I go into the book, I'd just like to congratulate Jim Pardue and recognize the tremendous contributions that he's made to the United States and to peace. I think this is especially important at a time when the current occupant of the White House clearly undervalues American diplomats. Expertise matters and so does character and Jim has both. His book, Peacekeepers, is important. It's analytical, it's penetrating, it has a fluid down-to-earth style with a wealth of first-hand detail. I found it riveting and I suspect such a well-informed audience as this one would also. No, I don't get 10% of the cut. I must also say that Jim is the exceedingly rare autobiographer, although it's not strictly speaking autobiography, who minimizes his own role and also freely admits his mistakes, although there weren't many and they were tangential. Let me just go right into the leverage question, which I think is central. Obviously, military leverage is key. We used it in Bosnia and Herzegovina at Incasivo and the training to quit program that Jim headed is also part of this. Legal is what I would say is the second lever and Jim alluded to this, charging or even just threatening to charge individuals with war crimes and sanctions on individuals. They work, not always, but they can be made to work. Third, economic assistance, Charles will like me by saying this or denial thereof clearly plays a role. Fourth, and this is something that Jim points out in his book and is often overlooked, is the question of prestige. Some of these foreign leaders have healthy egos and a meeting with the president of the United States is a real carrot to dangle out there. This was certainly done with regard to Milosevic, who desperately wanted to have a meeting with President Clinton. And finally, long range prospects for membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions, the EU and NATO is also important. Jim and his colleagues, especially his boss, Dick Holbrook, utilized these levers to maximum advantage and the details are in the book, I won't repeat them. But I think there are important differences today which will make the task of American diplomatic peacemakers more difficult. First of all, with regard to the military option, US combat forces, as we all know, are engaged militarily in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Africa, and US public opinion is clearly against more such involvements. Secondly, we have an erratic, unpredictable president without a knowledge base on foreign affairs. President Trump's lukewarm endorsement of NATO and his outspoken pro-Russian sympathies has demonstrated just last week by his refusal to implement CATSA, that's an acronym for Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. While Moscow is increasing its influence in the Western Balkans, all this erodes trust in the United States. Moreover, President Trump publicly undercuts his own secretary of state on a regular basis. Inevitably, all this diminishes the credibility of US negotiators. Jim used the term just now, the question of will, and I think this is exactly what we're talking about, or lack thereof. There's also much less bipartisan consensus on foreign policy in Congress. I'll be glad to talk about that in Q&A if you'd like. The Office of the Special Envoy in general has fallen out of favor. Thank heavens there's an exception with Kurt Volker in Ukraine. I regret to say that the international reputation of the United States has been severely harmed by the Iraq War, especially by Abu Ghraib, and subsequently by President Trump's actions withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Accord and in general, his America First policy. There are now alternative sources for economic assistance. It's not just the US anymore. China, Russia, Turkey, and more broadly, to use an old Soviet term, the correlation of forces has shifted away from the United States. This may be self-inflicted, I think it largely is, but it's a reality that our negotiators have to face. Several Balkan countries are now members of EU and or NATO. That's the good news, but the bad news is once you're in, leverage doesn't work so much anymore. All you have to do is look at the difficulties the EU is having disciplining Poland and Hungary. NATO has frozen out members out of the military committee, the Greeks, 67 to 74, and actually Portugal in the summer of 75. This may be tested with regard to Turkey and the Kurds, I hope not. And then finally, there's the broader question of technology, the internet, social media, right-wing populace, once local, and that was the case, except for radio and TV broadcasts in the Balkans. Now they've gone international, and of course, they're the disinformation campaigns by Russia. So is there still room for action? I've painted up all the differences. Well, what could be done? One concrete example in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to preempt secession by the Republic of Serbskja, why not station several hundred EU peacekeepers from U4 in Birchko? Thereby effectively splitting the RS. The EU does many wonderful things, but it's uncomfortable with machpolitik, which sometimes is necessary. Jim's book is about American diplomacy, so its focus is properly on the State Department and ad hoc creations like the Contact Group. Congress, you won't be surprised to hear me say, also played an important, if secondary, and often backstage role in much of what transpired. By far the most important congressional players in the Bosnian crisis were my old boss, Joe Biden, and former Senator Bob Dole. Joe Lieberman and John McCain also played important roles. Washington, you just can't look at a sheet of office holders in Washington and get the whole story. Personalities matter too, and aside from Biden who did have and does have a knowledge base and passion for American engagement in the Balkans, he had one unique advantage. Of all the hundred senators and 435 representatives, Biden had the closest personal relationship with President Bill Clinton. He spoke with him at least two or three times a week and often more frequently. He could therefore exert leverage, ultimately on the warning parties through the president who determined US policy. And I can tell you, Dick Holbrook took note and cultivated Biden, especially in the runup to the Kosovo War. I mean, I remember getting a phone call out of the blue in October 1998 from Holbrook on his cell phone who had just emerged from the meeting with Milošević. Why he didn't just want to tell Mike Haltzel, he wanted to tell Joe Biden what was going on. There was an amazing amount of backstage coordination. In November 1994, the FY95 Defense Authorization Act eliminated further funding for something called Operation Sharp Guard in which the US Sixth Fleet helped enforce the UN mandated arms embargo on Bosnia in the Adriatic because in practice, the arms embargo, well-intentioned though it was, only prevented weapons from only going to the Bosniaks. The Bosnian Serbs and Bosnia Croats were supplied over land. And again, I remember a conference near Bonn when the international press corps totally misunderstood this and the chairman of the Bundeswehr, General Klaus Nauman came in and read the riot act to them. This was important also because we looked the other way, as some of you may know, when Iran supplied the Bosniaks with light arms through Croatia, simply looked the other way. Biden constantly urged that Clinton threatened the use of American ground forces, especially if European peacekeeping forces had to be withdrawn from Bosnia to Govinda. He also, and the president took note of this and if you look at his First Air Force Academy speech in May of 95, he said that specifically. Then came Srebrenica and the Second Sarajevo Market Massacre. There was strong pressure from the Congress to intervene and we know what happened. Jumping ahead by the time of the conflict in Kosovo, Dole had retired from the Senate. If anything, Biden played an even more important role in Kosovo, often meeting at the White House with Clinton and I'll talk about that if you'd like in the Q and A. In fact, we contributed talking points to, again, it was an Air Force Academy commencement speech just by the luck of the draw that president Clinton gave. If I remember correctly, we put talking points specifically threatening a land invasion. The president chose to tone it down a bit, but he did talk about increasing US peacekeeping forces after the war was over from 4,000 to 7,000. He did use very strong language against Milosevic. Jim in his book says, and I quote, in the end, neither a NATO land invasion nor the use of attack helicopters was necessary. That's true, but I would submit that we came a lot closer than a lot of people think. Not only Biden, General West Clark, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, British Defense Minister who later became NATO Secretary General George Robertson were all pushing hard for the land option and it wasn't even clear where from. From Albania, Bosnia, Hungary, or Bulgaria. In Albania, the Tirana-Kukis road was strengthened specifically to accommodate armored personnel carriers, a fact that was undoubtedly known to Serbian intelligence. At the end of the day, no one, at least outside of Serbia, really knows exactly what persuaded Milosevic to capitulate, but I do think the threat of a ground invasion was certainly part of it. Another example of congressional action involves sending Milosevic to Ikti, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. In Jim's book, he states, Bill Montgomery convinced Gingic to send Milosevic to the Hague in June of 2001. Well, I'm sure that Ambassador Montgomery played a role, but I have to say I think more fundamentally important was the congressional threat to reimpose U.S. economic sanctions on Serbia, which had been withdrawn after Kastunicis that took over as president. What's the proof of this? Well, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Gingic came to Washington twice within six weeks that spring to try to talk us out of it. When we weren't talked out of it, very soon thereafter Milosevic was delivered to the Hague. Incidentally, as sidelight, I think the assassination of Zoran Gingic in March of 2003 was the single most harmful act in the last 20 years in the Balkans in terms of what might have been. One other thing which has direct relevance today, and I have to bring this up, Jim says in the book, quote, the sizable Albanian population and the pressure of a valley in southern Serbia had the capacity to cause considerable parallel trouble in Serbia if any partition proposal became serious in Kosovo. That's true, but it goes even further. There's no mention of a possible land swap of Prasheva, Medvedje, and Bujanovac in Serbia for the four Serbian majority municipalities in Kosovo north of the Ibar River. And this is actually what the borders were prior to 1957. I'm told that this idea is still being seriously discussed with Serbian recognition of Kosovo's independence as an important part of the package. I think it would be a terrible idea. We can talk about that in the Q and A also if you want. Also, there's mention of the violence in Mitrovica in March 2004, and it's absolutely true. Actually, it became, on St. Patrick's Day, a province-wide anti-Serb pogrom in Kosovo. U.S. troops, 11 bus loads of them, came up from Camp Bonn Steele about 10 minutes before the gun squad arrived at the Serbian center of Gracinica and basically saved the day. I have to tell one quick anecdote because I think it's instructive of how backstage stuff can work. When Biden was in Kosovo in the winter, I guess it was 2000, 2001, we met with all the leaders, and one of them was Ramush Haridinai, who's now the prime minister. He comes from Western Kosovo, tough guy was a guerrilla leader, somebody you could talk to. We got back to Washington. Biden wrote a letter to Haridinai. We had also visited the Vysauky-Dechani Serbian Orthodox Monastery, early 14th century jewel UN World Heritage site. Biden wrote him a letter saying, look, I know this is your territory. I'm counting on you to be sure that it's protected because there had been crazies who had tried to climb over the walls and whatever. When the pogrom came on St. Patrick's Day three years later, there were churches, cathedrals burned down all over Kosovo, Vysauky-Dechani wasn't touched. And I went to Kosovo a few months later and Haridinai greeted me with the simple words, I hope Senator Biden was taking notice of what happened. Now, quickly, what should be essential ingredients of an effective, ingredients to an effective agreement? First of all, the big thing, realization that no better alternative is available and Jim sketches out how Aliyah Izetbegovic, the head of the Bosniaks, finally was made to understand this at Dayton. Secondly, the realization that the potential consequences of not reaching an agreement are dire. Well, again, I'm talking more about Dayton, the war would have resumed and I think it's pretty clear that Priyad or in other places would have fallen. And third, and this is commonsensical, that no party be completely satisfied or completely dissatisfied. In other words, that there not be a diktat that everybody is only partially satisfied. What are the challenges of implementing peace agreements? As Jim points out, there's little appetite today for American leadership, except in counter-terrorist operations. So it's likely that we'll need to rely on UN blue helmets and our president is not exactly a fan of the UN or any multilateral operations. We should certainly, in any blue helmet operation, insist on a sensible chain of command, sufficiently liberal rules of engagement to avoid a repeat of hostage taking at peacekeepers, which was the story from 1992 to 1994 in Bosnia. For the longer term, in order to go beyond peace implementation to genuine reconciliation, the key, it seems to me, is education. And everybody knows the various nationalities in the Western Balkans are famous for weaponizing history. I would urge you to read another book edited by a Purdue professor, Charlie Ingraio and Thomas Emert called Confronting the Yugoslav Controversy, the Scholars Initiative, really worthwhile. It's a multi-authored book by the authors from the various nationalities of the Balkans. Ideally, a joint history curriculum for elementary and secondary schools should be developed and implemented and not have the segregation of students as is going on in places like Mustard. The Croats go to school in the morning, the Bosnians in the afternoon. And more broadly, we have to involve civil society as much as possible in implementation. Finally, corruption. It's a cancer on democracy and a severe impediment to peace implementation and reconciliation. I agree completely with all of Jim's prescriptions. Put anti-corruption measures at the top of our assistance programs, demand transparency, install competitive processes and procurement, increase financial controls and oversight and hold foreign officials accountable. He implemented all these in the training and equipped program and that's why it was such a success. However, like it or not, the fact is that many of the most prominent leaders in the Boy Scouts, in the Balkans are not Boy Scouts. All you have to do is go to Sarajevo or Pristina and go with natives and they'll tell you that incredible palace on the hill belongs to, I'll let you fill in the names. And they're not even shy about it. Unfortunately, although it's distasteful in order to secure and implement peace, we have needed to and on occasion will probably continue to need to cooperate with these folks. And of course, nothing would go further toward reducing corruption than broadly based lawful economic development. Related to corruption is the issue of war crimes the U.S. should have absolutely nothing to do with convicted war criminals. But we also must respect the decisions of the courts. If somebody's indicted and then exonerated and he or she is in a position of authority, of course we should deal with him or her. And of course, Haridina is example A, he has been twice indicted and twice exonerated by international courts. And finally, very last word, we should realize the simple fact that people can change. Should never forget that Zoran Djingic began his career as an ultra nationalist, but he evolved into what I consider to have been a Democrat. I have other comments about some of the wonderful characters that Jim describes in the book whom I had episodic contact with, but I'll save that for over cocktails or Q&A if you'd like. Thank you. Mike, thank you so much. This is so far been a very rich discussion on a lot of perspectives. Before we go to questions from the audience, I wanna give Jim the opportunity to pose a question or make a response comment to what Mike has said. I just wanna say something about corruption. I think we have to be very careful, I disagree with my friend here a little bit on this. I think we have to be very careful about talking ourselves into accepting corruption because our clients are thugs. I just have come to the position that I reject that. It doesn't work, it didn't work in Vietnam, it didn't work in Iraq, it doesn't work in Afghanistan. And they are the demandor, they're not in charge. They need our resources. And I think that we ought to demand high levels of control of resources that we provide. If we don't, it absolutely undermines everything we do in terms of convincing people that democracy is a good thing because what they see is the big house on the hill. And so, yes, I know, but I also don't believe in the conversion of thugs. I've worked with a lot of thugs and I don't believe in conversion. I think you, I sat down with the guy, when we started training quit program, the minister of defense of the Bosnia oxide sat in front of me and said, I need $4 million to start this program. I said, minister, you need to have one thing, you need to understand one thing and one thing very clearly. Not one nickel of this money will ever go through your hands, not one nickel. You tell us what needs to be bought. Elected to a national office in elections that are judge free and fair, do we then just simply say, well, you were a crook 15 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago, you now happen to be in a national office, we're gonna cut off relations with you. I don't think we can do that. No, you can't, no, obviously you can, but you can build programs that where the money doesn't go through their hands. Oh, that's for the future, I agree completely. Yeah, sure. All right, well, open it up to the audience. Let's hear your questions. Please, right here. Yes, please. I'm Tom Bradley from George Mason University. I'd like to ask you given that idea of not letting money pass through the hands of the club, how can you train and educate, provide military intelligence or military equipment to a country like Ukraine where the government is corrupt with the top or the same from the top down? How can you separate actors within the government so that you can actually provide military equipment, training, intelligence, all those things to a government that is corrupt from the top down? Next panel. Yeah, I mean, my quick answer to that is don't give them the money. Handle the money yourself. I really, we didn't, by the way, in Boston, we didn't give any money for soldiers. We didn't pay salaries. We said, look, your country, your army, you will train you, we'll equip you, but we're not paying them because a lot of this leakage is through salaries and I think we need to take a hard look at that. I think you can do most of it through procedures and you just have to be tough about it. I mean, frankly, anti-corruption is not the high part of our policy agenda in many of these places and probably the Ukraine. We talk ourselves out of accepting it, but I just think in the long run, if we just let these, we don't pay attention to these procedures. We pay a price for it in things like Karzai, whose relationships around the country, he had no influence outside his palace. Why? Because the police and everybody in the government was stealing money all over the place and the people knew it. So I just think we've got to make this a priority, sorry. Okay. Here. Got a microphone, got a front on the, do you think you can get this? Meto Kaloski with UMD, good to see you all and we're actually going to host an event with Ambassador Perdue on the Macedonia front, probably February or early March. My discussion, my question deals with implementation. First thing is in terms of, there's still fear in Macedonia of these potential greater Albania. And so what are the assurances of the old Crete agreement or these types of agreements on territorial integrity, the sovereignty of these nations? And then the other goes to influences of other countries, for example, Albania back in December of 2016, brought the leaders of the Albanian minority in Macedonia and brought them to Toronto and they worked on a type of a Toronto platform that called on Macedonia to change its flag, to be accommodating more to the Albanian minority, its anthem implement language laws that would apply to the entire country and not so much in that only the areas, the Albanian minority and so. And then some of these thugs that you're mentioning, can you probably elaborate in Macedonia and seeing some of them, the characters today? Yeah, first of all, in dealing with the Albanian leaders in Macedonia, I never found them interested in breaking away from Macedonia and aligning themselves with either coastal or Albanians. They had political power inside of Macedonia. What they wanted was more influence in the structures. So I never saw, I never encountered any of them eager to run off and join up with. In fact, I had conversations with a lot of them who said, you know, they were offended by some of these guys, outsiders, these Albanians coming in and trying to influence them. I think it was a huge mistake for Albania to get involved, the nation of Albania, to get involved and as you described a year or so ago. But that was way too sensitive. They shouldn't have done it. I think the U.S., frankly, should have tried to influence them not to do that. And so I just, I don't think there's a real question of unity of Macedonia. I think it's a matter of working out the political arrangements for the future. The big question there is the name issue and we have the most hopeful period right now that ever and hopefully Nimitz can solve that in the next few weeks. I'm gonna just say a word, Meadow, you're right. And I think that trend lines are not good because for a long time the Albanian government in Toronto was a good neighbor in the Balkans and was refraining from intervening in any way with the Albanian minorities in other countries. And it's continued, including in all places, Montenegro, the one country in the Western Balkans which has been notably successful in integrating its Albanian and Slavic Muslim minority. And over an issue about a town, sort of a suburb of Podgorica called Tuzi, the same sort of behavior. And I think it's very unfortunate, but it's a relatively new development. To mine, I don't follow it on a 24-7 basis, but I don't think it's stopped. Other questions, yeah, Doug? Doug Wake, former Foreign Service Officer and OSCE official, including spending some time in Serbia and Montenegro, OSCE mission. First, from that capacity, I have to say a word of thanks to Ambassador Perdue for the words you said about the Foreign Service. And the role of international organizations as someone who come from a different background and recognizes that these institutions are under some threat now. I'd like to ask you to think a little bit about or give us a couple of comments on the link between the Balkans and possible action in Ukraine because I think Mike and others discussed some of the differences very well. And one of the differences that nobody's quite explicitly highlighted is that you have as a party to the conflict in Ukraine, a permanent member of the Security Council, a country which, although it was alluded to when you're talking about military options, are never going to involve the kind of steps that we took against Serbia, particularly the Kosovo conflict. So what I'm wondering before it moves from your panel to the next is if you can try to identify some of the elements that are really common from your experience in the pressure that was exerted to get a solution to the various conflicts in the Balkans that might actually give us some hope for an American role in this current conflict. Well, in the Bosnian period, Russia was very eager to work closely with the West and that was easy. In 1999 when Putin came to power, everything changed. Now, the Russians stayed in the contact group which I think is important because the contact group was the way that we talked to them about, even though we didn't agree, we could talk to them. And they at least would, Moscow would at least know where we were coming from and they never broke with the contact group at least through 2008. I don't know where it stands now, maybe there is no contact group. There's a lot of shallow hostility about international organizations today. International organizations are, can be, as all of you know, who work with them can be difficult and troubling to, but they're not our subordinates. And we have to work with it. And the payoff is huge. By getting international organizations involved in American foreign policy, A, they can reduce the cost if they participate. But perhaps more importantly, it's a way for the United States to exert its influence. We may not win the debate, but the fact that we debated, that we take it there, that we're serious about it, that we put our proposals on the table and we speak to the world through the United Nations and these other organizations is important. The Russians can be to it and the Russians never agreed to the Odessary proposal for independence in Kosovo, but the independence happened. And what made it happen more easily is because we had gone through two or three years of extensive diplomacy, painful diplomacy with the United Nations that Odessary had done his job and the Russians were involved in it from start to finish. And at the end, Russian diplomat, I was in Moscow one time, the Russian diplomat looked up at me and said, Jim, we can't stop you from getting independence for Kosovo, but you're gonna pay a price for that and the price for that's Georgia. And as I reported that, but as it turned out, that's true. So, just engaging them and the use of international organizations is extremely powerful and there's a lot of shallow stuff now about the UN and others is crazy. We're bigger than that. Last question back here. You made a mention of involving civil society more in implementation of peace agreements, but by then the terms are baked in and civil society may go along because they're getting funding from the elements who were involved in negotiations, but the general populace may or may not be supportive. What about involving civil society more in the negotiations themselves? I think that'd be very hard. Any negotiation that you do, I mean just Holbrook working with the contact group was tough because the more parties you have talking to the parties of a conflict, the more complicated and difficult it gets. And so I think there's a limit to how big the negotiating table is. Now civil society is very important in some of these places there was no real civil society and we had to work on it. One of the points I make in the book is the level of absorption. We tend to run in real fast when we get some kind of deal and really kind of flood the place with resources and frequently they're not really capable of absorbing it all. Afghanistan, schools with no teachers, hospital with no doctors, roads going nowhere. I mean there was just a lot of assistance programs that went in and I think, I don't have a real good answer for that but I do think we need to look at the absorption possibility. It's never gonna be as fast as the United States wants it to be. Never. We are very anxious to get something settled and done and moved on and there we go. Afghanistan is a 100 year project, Bosnia generations. So it's gonna take a while. Yeah, real quick on that. I agree with Jim. Obviously getting the civil society people involved in the nitty gritty of the negotiation is I think pretty much impossible but as Doug Waite will attest and other people in this room, Orrest and a few others, one area where civil society at least has pretty close to equal right of speaking up is the OSCE and especially at the human dimension implementation meeting, the annual two week meeting in Warsaw. I was honored to lead a US delegation there several years ago and the Russians are completely against allowing representatives of civil society to speak because the overwhelming majority of civil society is against the thuggishness and the authoritarianism that the Russians are practicing. So I mean and in terms of nitty gritty on the ground, I mean I mentioned Maastar, a city split geographically between Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats and they, at least the last time I looked, they had arrangements in schools where they were segregated separate but equal. This might sound hopelessly naive but wouldn't it be nice if members of civil societies from the Bosnian community and the Bosnian Croats community, probably females, I give them credit for this, would say hey, this is wrong. We think our kids ought to go to school together at least part of the day. I mean there's a concrete example of where a vibrant civil society if helped by the powers that be might actually have an influence. It's at least worth trying. And there are civil society groups in Bosnia incidentally. My center at Sykes put on a conference there a few years ago and there is no shortage of talent. They just have no power whatsoever. Well I think we've just got the issues going here and as we change panels, please join me in thanking Mike and Jim for their thoughts. I probably want to change the water. Okay well now we're onto the second panel and I think this is going to be interesting because we've already started digging into the issues and look forward to hearing what our new panel has to say. As we've discussed before the focus of this panel is looking at the lessons from the Balkans and specifically into what can be done in Ukraine. We have a great panel, just quick intros. John Herps is the director of the Atlantic Councils, Dino Patricio Eurasia Center. Before the Atlantic Council, John served for 31 years in US Foreign Service. He was US Ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2000 to 2003. Sarah Mendelson is a Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and she is head of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College. Previously she was US Ambassador to the UN and US Representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. She has spent over two decades working on development and human rights as a scholar and a practitioner. Boris Ruge is Minister and Deputy Chief of Mission in the German Embassy here in Washington. He was previously the German Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Special Envoy for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. A particular interest to us today, he was head of the Political Department in the Office of the High Representative and the EU Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2006 to 2008. And he was Chief Political Advisor to two successive commanders of K-4 from 2001 to 2002. So with those introductions, let's get right into the questions and I'll start with you, John. So Jim Bardu has notes that American peacemakers use aggressive diplomacy to give structure, incentives, and momentum to the peace process. When necessary, they authorize the use of NATO military force to end the fighting. Is the model of aggressive diplomacy backed by force an option for peace building in Eastern Ukraine? Should the US and the EU be more aggressive in dealing with Ukraine and Russia? What leverage or incentives does the international community have to influence the parties to compromise and negotiate seriously, John? First, it's important to understand that the problem in Ukraine has a serious, seriously different from the problem in the Balkans because you have one of the world's two great nuclear superpowers coming aggression against its neighbors. So the risks of American action are much higher in Ukraine than they are in the Balkans. Everyone in the world seems to understand that. What is not nearly as well understood is that the risk of American inaction is greater in Ukraine than it was in the Balkans. When one of the world's second largest military power is changing borders by force and running a war against its neighbors, that is a principal threat to global security, global stability, and the prosperity based upon global stability. Now, the short answer to your question is that you need strong American diplomacy to deal with this problem. I hesitate to use the word aggressive because of the associations of that word, but you need strong American diplomacy because the only force that can stop aggression committed by Moscow is the United States. Now, I'm not advocating here that American troops meet Russian troops in Donbass and let's not kid ourselves, there are thousands of regular Russian soldiers, principally officers right now in Donbass. I am suggesting that while Moscow is the world's second greatest military power and much stronger than Ukraine and any military standoff, it has significant weaknesses which we can and should exploit. The Obama administration's policy towards Ukraine was exceptionally weak and I don't think President Obama just did great power politics and I can get into that if someone wants to talk about that in Q and A. But the Obama administration had the right policy on sanctions, this was more leadership from behind the principal authors of our sanction policy were Dan Fried and Tori Nuland, not President Obama. He essentially said, see what you can do and they did some very good work in part because the Chancellor of Germany sometime mid-late summer of 2014 realized she had a problem in the east which he didn't understand perhaps at the beginning of that year and her leadership from that point forward was absolutely essential and remains essential to this day. So strong sanctions are important to bringing Moscow to stop its aggression in Ukraine. The second element of a strong American diplomacy was a step that the Obama administration was very reluctant to take although it took some many steps and that's to provide serious arms to Ukraine. The Obama administration to its credit did give something called counter-battery radar for missiles to Ukraine which reduced substantially Ukrainian casualties but they refrained from providing quote unquote lethal weapons. The Trump administration despite the very peculiar instincts of the president has pursued a much better policy towards Russia and towards Ukraine than its predecessor by not just continuing the sanctions policy although Congress deserves credit for that the President by himself was heading off in the wrong direction but then deciding to arm Ukraine. And all of the chicken littles who claim that Russia would escalate in Ukraine once we provide lethal weapons have been proved wrong at least over the past seven weeks. Of course the response from the Kremlin to decisions to send Javelin missiles has been very, very mild. A deputy foreign minister said something that was it. And the reason why it was mild because Putin has a loser in Ukraine and escalation is a bad political step for the Kremlin. Now, having said all that, that doesn't mean that we're going to see a just and fair piece emerge in Ukraine. We have seen some signs over the past six or eight months of reconsideration in Moscow. Those signs are evident first in the very serious talks that are taking place between Kurt Volker and Fyatislav Sarkov. And the interesting thing about these talks besides the fact that some interesting conversations are taking place is that Volker sounds like me. In other words, an unabashed, I wouldn't say hawk, unabashed advocate of strong diplomacy against Kremlin aggression. Yet the Russians treat him as a conduit for possible progress. That's point one, that's the most important point. Point two, we've seen Moscow think tankers who want to maintain good graces of the Kremlin floating very interesting ideas. Two articles have appeared over the past two months. One by four different authors. I'm Alexander Dinkin, Trubnikov's first name, I forget, he's a general or former general. Zagorsky and the fourth name, Alexei Abaratov, which talked about all sorts of interesting peacekeeping ideas, which in fact could lead to a peace in Donbas. The second article is by a guy considered to be always the most interesting foreign policy thinker among the officials in Moscow, official thinkers, and that's Dmitry Trenin. Who a month after President Trump won his campaign, his election, was saying Ukraine would have to do whatever Russia wanted, because they were expecting very friendly American policy, which never emerged. But then about five or six weeks ago, he put out a very different peace in which he said into alia that, well, Russia could actually live with Ukraine and NATO. Who'da thunk it? Anyway, serious people in Moscow have permission from Anhy to be floating these ideas. Because Putin's idea that he could somehow control Ukraine has turned out to be a very bad policy, very bad move. That's basically an answer to your question, but I'd like to say one more thing. We've heard a lot in the last first hour about corruption in Ukraine. What we've heard has been to be polite, inexact. Corruption in Ukraine is a serious problem, no doubt about it. And it goes to the highest levels of the government, no doubt about it. But it's also true that there has been extraordinary success in fighting corruption in Ukraine. Ground zero for corruption in Ukraine for the last 25 years was a place called Naftakhaz, the official gas company of the Ukrainian government. Reforms put into place starting three years ago, which made all pricing for gas market pricing, as a result of which a $9 billion Ukrainian perpetual budget deficit became a surplus. And the principal source of ill-gotten gains was removed from the playing field. Second reform, which did away with massive corruption, was something called prozoro. And actually, USID had a lot to do with prozoro, they provided support for this. And prozoro made all government contracting transparent. Now, there remain serious corruption in Ukraine, especially in the courts, especially in the justice system, and we see resistance at the top. But the corruption in Ukraine has not led to the abuse of American assistance, the abuse of international assistance. And what I find is Ukraine has a serious problem with corruption, and keep in mind, I say this as probably the only person in this room who's drawn the personal ire of a prime minister of Ukraine for slamming him on corruption. So I'm not a softy on this issue. But this issue is overstated and misplayed, in part by people who don't follow us closely enough, and in part, of course, by those who want to do the bidding of a giant neighbor to the north of Kiev. And with that, I'm done. Okay, thank you, John. So Boris, there's been a lot of discussion about US diplomacy, and yet Ukraine is in the EU neighborhood. Just wondering if you could talk to us a bit about the role of the EU and what kind of leverage is there, what kind of role does EU play in bringing peace to Ukraine. Many thanks, Charles, and thanks for having me today. First, I think I agree with John that it's difficult to overstate the differences between the Western Balkans' strategic context and what we're looking at in Ukraine because we have Russia there. It is the dominant military power in that part of the world. So there's many options we do not have that existed for NATO in the Balkans. If we look at our leverage, I would start, I have a number of points. I would say first and foremost, our leverage is the EU and the United States of America working hand in glove, that's key. It's always key, it's particularly important in this case. And then I'd mention a number of things, and I'll make it short. First, denying Russia and the forces backed by it in eastern Ukraine any kind of recognition and hanging in there for the long haul. There's no guarantee that we can change the situation in eastern Ukraine and in Crimea, but I think we have experiences from European history in the 20th century suggesting that you can maintain the legal position for a very long period of time and you can change realities on the ground. And sometimes you need to think in terms of years and decades and so on. So maintaining that legal position, denying recognition is key. Now, economic leverage is key as well. And that's something that we have used. It has something that has had a major impact on Russia. It has come at a significant price, by the way, something that is sometime underestimated in Washington, D.C. It is the German economy that pays much higher of a price for maintaining sanctions than the U.S. economy or some of our EU partners. But as John pointed out, Chancellor Merkel has been very clear on this and we've been willing to pay that price. So that's important. Third point, I think this is extremely important. Making Ukraine strong and making Ukraine attractive to those who have been pulled into the Russian orbit, if you want to call it that, that's key. So the stronger Ukraine is in terms of democracy, of its economy, of a vibrant civil society and all those things, the harder it becomes for people in Eastern Ukraine and also Crimea in the long term. So that's important. I think those are the three key points that I would highlight. Great. Thank you so much. Sarah, we've already heard a lot about corruption. In the first panel, John's made some important points here as well. And, but let me just, you know, reflect back on just a few weeks ago, it was former Vice President Joe Biden, who we've heard was heavily engaged in this part of the world, went further than Jim has gone in terms of the issue of corruption to say that the Ukraine's reforms related to corruption are critical to achieving peace in the Donbass. Do you believe that the reforms and the peace process are that closely linked and knowing the state of corruption in Ukraine, what concrete measures can be taken to address corruption before or as part of a peace process? Thank you, Charles, and thank you to our host at USIP. There are, as John suggested, many, many different angles to discussing both corruption and crimes. I wanna start, actually, in the Balkans. My engagement with the Balkans began as a Russia scholar with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, looking at this moment of success between US, Russia, and military. It was lauded as the high point. As I investigated the US, Russia, and military relationship in Bosnia and then later in Kosovo, I discovered a very dark underside, which was that the deployment of both NATO and UN troops had stimulated a demand for the trafficking of women and girls into Bosnia and later Kosovo, and that in some cases, while many uniformed service members served honorably, US contractors were involved, various parts of NATO and UN peacekeeping missions were involved. This led to about 14 years ago, exactly the first ever meeting at NATO on this issue, which I had the privilege to co-host along with the US ambassador and the Norwegian ambassador. The Norwegian ambassador did this because he had been the SRSG in Bosnia, and he found this unfinished business. He was mortified by what had happened when he was the UN secretary general's special representative in Bosnia and was determined to address this. If you wanna read more about it, I suggest my barracks and brothels, which you can find online. There's a great report that Human Rights Watch produced in 2002 called Hope's Betrayed, which details a lot of this, and there's the movie, The Whistle Blower. All to say that we're gonna talk a little bit more about lessons learned, best practices. We know that this is an ongoing problem. We don't wanna have the international involvement be a stimulus for corruption. Now, going to Ukraine and going to the people of Ukraine, let's not forget that Euro Maidan was about, ultimately, a popular movement against corruption, and this is what absolutely drove, I think, Mr. Putin and the Kremlin mad. The scene of peaceful Ukrainian citizens walking on the estate of Yanukovych and finding all that they found. I mean, for me, I think of that moment for Mr. Putin as a similar moment when the wall comes down and he's trying to call Moscow to get a response in their silence. This is a definitive moment for how Putin thinks about the entire involvement. To the point that Ukraine has made progress, there's something called the Open Government Partnership. It is a voluntary movement. It involves governments and civil society. They're equal at the table. Ukraine joined in 2012. OGP started in 2011. I encourage you to go online and learn more about Ukraine's promise, its commitments, particularly the 2016 to 2018 plan. It's multifaceted. It addresses procurement, open budgets, a variety of transparency and accountability mechanisms. It's complex. It's difficult to implement. It's an ongoing project, but it gives you a sense of the multi-stakeholder effort inside Ukraine. So far be it for me to criticize Vice President Biden. I think that it's obviously an important part of it, but understanding what else is going on in terms of inside Ukraine on the corruption piece is important now finally to go to Russia. This is the real vulnerability for the Kremlin. This is why Mr. Navalny is under such heat. It's also why he gets upwards of 30 million viewers looking at his YouTube. The issue of corruption is something that motivates populations. Oftentimes more than all sorts of other crimes, including torture or disappearance. It's what led to the fall of Pinochet. So I think that to the extent that there is a kind of global movement on transparency and accountability, a global movement pressing towards open and a countervailing effort towards closed, I'm gonna bet on the side of open. And I think that also everything that you're holding in your pocket with the iPhone and transparency and accountability that's provided by technology is helping to fuel this. So ultimately we can talk more about the details of what a peace process looks like, what a peacekeeping operation would look like. We have to be at the forefront in understanding the role of corruption, but I don't think it's the biggest obstacle. Great. Thank you, sir. John talking about details. So Jim has spoken about the need for specific measurable commitments. For Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo, this meant very detailed and lengthy documents. I think Bosnia, I think Jim said with three large binders, Macedonia, 15 pages, Kosovo, 60 pages. While in Eastern Slavonia, the UN got by with a basic agreement with 14 points. So what is needed for peace in Ukraine? How do you balance the need for measurable commitments with the need for flexibility to manage a complex process? In a sense, all you need for peace in Donbass is for Putin to withdraw his troops and stop the aggression. Of course, it's not as simple as that, but you will have the dawn of a real peace when he can see us in his mind that he cannot achieve his objectives and he has to get out. You have this negotiating process in train. And in fact, I neglected to mention when I talked about the circle of Volcker channel that you still have the Minsk negotiations which are important because the Minsk framework remains the framework of these talks. But in these, in the circle of Volcker talks, ideas are being put forward on key issues which could be the cover behind which Moscow gives up its imperial aim in Eastern Ukraine. For this to happen though, you need to maintain the pressure from the West. Boris is right that US-EU cooperation is essential. The sanctions, I mean, I would love to see sanctions increase and I have all sorts of ideas to do that but just maintaining them is probably enough. I'd like to see more American and Western military equipment going to Ukraine. I'll bet we will see that, albeit it should be done quietly. The Russians will pick it up via their intelligence anyway and you don't need to rub their faces in it. But these are the things that you need. A peacekeeping force in connection with international control of the border which would stop the Russian ability to send in troops, to send in arms, for that matter to send in money could be an important face saver which would enable Moscow to climb down from this tree. That's how I see it. But again, all of these negotiations are simply theater in which we find out the intentions of the Russian leadership. Oh, excuse me, one more important point and I shouldn't minimize this. Ukraine will have to do some important things relating to decentralization, to permit elections and including special elections in the occupied territories. And I remain convinced that this will happen at the end of the day but the political process in Ukraine is dysfunctional on this issue because everybody's so concerned about getting an edge on their political opponent as opposed to doing the national interest requirements of the Ukrainian people. But here, strong Western diplomacy, including, well actually I'm on the record, I won't say that. Strong Western diplomacy could be helpful as well. So Boris, your observations on the balance between flexibility and very specific commitments but also from the EU perspective, we have a large and complex agreement enforcing that, thinking from an EU perspective with its broad membership, what are the challenges you see there? Seems to me an ambassador of Parduk can disagree, obviously the analogy, the closest analogy we have from the Balkans is Eastern Slavonia and possibly Macedonia, not so much Kosovo, not so much Bosnia-Herzegovna because obviously no one's proposing to put Ukraine as a whole under some kind of international transitional authority as a starting point. Now we do have an agreement and that's the Minsk Agreement. Now people complain and rightly that it has not been implemented but it says all the things that are important actually. It talks about full restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty of control of the borders and it talks, that's the other side of the coin, about local autonomy and these kinds of things, amnesty. So we have a starting point. The fact that it hasn't been implemented doesn't speak against the agreement per se and in fact the French and German view, France and Germany being the Western participants, if you like, in the Normandy format, our view has been that we should stick with this. The new element that comes into the picture here is precisely the notion of a UN peacekeeping operation which interestingly was put on the table by the Russians, remarkable. It was put forward in such a way as to raise a number of concerns, legitimate, I think which we share with the government of Ukraine, but all of us I think have decided, the US government, the Europeans and the government of Ukraine that we should try and work this to develop a UN peacekeeping operation that would allow for Minsk to be implemented and of course this is where we work very closely with Kurt Volcker and Open Brackets, we're delighted that it's him who's taken on this job for the US government. So that's something that we have, we have a building block which is Minsk, we are in the midst of a discussion about how the UN could be brought into the picture to help implementation of Minsk, but it tied to a number of very clear conditions on which we agree with Ukraine. So let me stay with you Boris and go beyond the agreement to actually implementation. Jim is very colorfully described, the implementation is the difficult, often grinding side of peacemaking, I think he also called it unsexy as a USAID officer, I think it's very sexy, but that's another matter, we can talk about that later. But he did say that in most cases it's far more, the implementation is far more difficult and always takes much more time than the negotiation itself. What will be the critical challenges in implementing an agreement in Ukraine? What capabilities would an international peacekeeping and an international interim administration require? So a number of things, as you mentioned, I have some experience in Kosovo working for NATO and I have some experience from Bosnia and of course there was a lessons learned between Bosnia and Kosovo, I think our approach in Kosovo from 1999 onwards was an improvement. What you need is you need a very good structure for coordination, you need a person who runs that structure, you need to bring all the key stakeholders to the table. And that's, as we all know, anyone who has ever been involved in these things knows that this is really hard work. You're talking about several international organizations, if in fact in Ukraine there could be agreement about a UN peacekeeping operation, you would have the OSCE, you would have the UN, you would have the EU working on the economic side of this, you would have several governments being part of this, the US government of course, Russia as well on the other hand, major European governments and bringing those people to the table and getting them to pull in the same direction is really, really hard. And much of the time it doesn't work and we had a period and Bosnia worked very well with Patti Ashton, but it's difficult. So you need clarity in terms of the coordinating structures on the ground, you need a good mechanism and I think Ambassador Pardou describes that as well in terms of what we had back in the Balkans in terms of a contact group, those kinds of things. You meet and make things work at the UN Security Council, it's difficult. Just to end on this, obviously if you did have a UN peacekeeping operation to implement Minsk, it would need to be a robust operation, that's pretty clear from a German point of view, I think there's agreement with the US and France and Ukraine on this, so you would be, you'd have to have an ability to enforce the agreement on the ground and that's an interesting proposition obviously, but if the government of Russia changed its calculus, that is of course what we're talking about. If they came to recognize that their policy so far has done nothing but push Ukraine away from Russia, unify large parts of the population of Ukraine in a sort of pro-European direction, and if Russia were to come to the conclusion that what it is doing here is very costly and unproductive, then there's a chance that Moscow might change its calculus and opt for a more constructive approach, which I think would allow us to deal with all those problems in eastern Ukraine, Crimea is perhaps more difficult. Okay, great. Sarah, your thoughts. So let's follow the lead of Letzav Havel and think as if this were possible, as if this were gonna happen. I think the first thing is the Secretary General needs to be invested in this. When a new peacekeeping mission has stood up, having the Secretary General understand it as part of his or her mission is important. Following on the last Secretary General's lead, there's been a lot of thinking about how to do humanitarian assistance in a different way. The World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 followed a report that came out of the UN Ocha, the office that coordinates humanitarian assistance called One Humanity Shared Responsibility, and it's relevant for peacekeeping in that it is really putting a premium on the role that local organizations, local populations play. Rather than having a supply side from New York or other based agencies, you're really putting a premium on what are the needs on the ground. Number one, you'd have to have also a very strong, robust SRSG who implemented a policy of zero tolerance on a range of issues, not just said that there was a policy of zero tolerance on, for example, corruption. And that will mean expelling people, it might mean arresting people. You'd need to have probably a troop commitment of somewhere between 30 and 40,000, so it's not too soon to think about what countries might provide those troops. It's probably no NATO countries. It's a question of who exactly would be there. And I think that there's one final issue that was touched on. There are a variety of details that need to be worked out, but we have a lot of experience with this and I think that both in terms of the peacekeeping operation, the mandate, the sequencing, and for the International Interim Administration, we can figure this out, there is a very thorny issue of transitional justice, historical memory, we touched on it in the last panel. I think we're a long way from actually knowing how to do this well. We're actually pretty good at elections and running in and being able to set that up, both U.S. organizations, the UN more generally, but on this issue of how countries reconcile with violent episodes of their past or with their neighbors is still very much an ongoing exercise and the latest research suggests that rather than having it be international tribunals, that local demand for transitional justice is stronger. So let's take a shift to different questions here. We've already had some comments in the first panel and by you just now in terms of the role of civil society and so forth. But when we look back at the Balkans peace process, what are the lessons we should draw from that period and even more from what we have learned as best practices since then for how to have an inclusive peace process? What concrete actions can we take to make the peace process and the peace keeping mission that might occur in Ukraine a more inclusive process? You know, in the last 20 years there's been a lot of research on the role of having an inclusive process which includes, for example, women in the discussion and the ability for the peace keeping agreement to stick. The evidence is pretty solid that if you don't, the majority of peace keeping agreements or peace operations fail. So I think it's important, there's gonna have to be demand signals from different parts of the international system that those who are engaged in negotiations include women. The peace keeping operation should include, best practices suggest at least 30% women troops. I think that I understand the point about negotiations being difficult having spent 15 months at the UN on a range of issues and that having civil society at the table may complicate things. But again, this issue of having some ability to make sure that local variety of issues, whether it is the violence that's been experienced or it's the delivery of pensions or making sure that things aren't missed, that there is a role and ability to understand at some point in the process. There's a lot of psychosocial needs that should be addressed and oftentimes are overlooked. There's a lot of trauma that's gone on. And again, I don't think that we're always well set up to, we have certain things that we do well and certain things that are actually extremely important in the normalization, if you will, of a society that has experienced what is going on in Eastern Ukraine. And it's not necessarily that the US or the Europeans or the UN aren't capable of doing it, it means that you've gotta have, you gotta go the extra mile or kilometer and think through what that means. John, can you give you a follow up on that? How do you see the getting civil society involved? How do you see getting the needs of people reflected in negotiations as well as an implementation and even in the peacekeeping process? I think that these are secondary issues to the principal issue of getting Russia to withdraw from Donbass. And I think the best way to get Russia to withdraw from Donbass is by using those measures that we've already discussed. But it is true that Ukraine is a emerging democratic and open society. And that Ukraine will need to do certain things within the Minsk process, within the context of the Volcker-Sirkov negotiations which require political will. So it's important to engage civil society in this conversation so that the Rada, which needs to pass legislation, will pass legislation necessary to meet the Ukrainian side of these commitments. I would add that the issue of corruption, which is related but distinct from the problem of Russian aggression in Donbass, requires a heavy civil society role. And in fact, the position I've taken consistently for the past four years, given the questionable instincts of the top leadership in Ukraine regarding corruption, is that you only get real reform in Ukraine by a combination of civil society, the United States, the EU, and the international financial institutions. And if you look carefully at the process of reform in Ukraine, you'll see that's been actually a pretty good guide. Oh, and last point, I don't wanna give a short shrift to this. Well, again, the big question is changing Putin's mind and getting his boys out of Donbass. There are serious humanitarian issues created by Kremlin aggression and they are in the process of being addressed although Ukraine has limited resources. And the international community needs to be mindful of these problems and prepared to step up when you have the peace to provide that assistance to deal with the 1.7 IDPs, the eight or so hundred thousand refugees, and the terrible damage done by Kremlin aggression to infrastructure and business in eastern Ukraine. And on that score, we're gonna have an event at the Atlanta Council on March 20, talking all about that. Great. Well, good. So on that topic, if you will, Boris, when we talk, look, beyond having an agreement, first you gotta get the agreement, then you have to implement it, but then there's the question of sustaining the peace. And Jim has noted that limited economic investment continues to exacerbate ethnic tensions in the Balkans. The economy of eastern Ukraine has already in serious decline before the war and has declined significantly since. What needs to be done? What are the priorities to revitalize that economy and create good paying jobs to sustain the peace in eastern Ukraine? And can Ukraine count on EU investment to provide the resources needed? Obviously we hope that it can count on US investments as well, just fine. But the key thing, several key points. Number one, it's not just about eastern Ukraine. John would know what is the percentage of territory that is occupied, maybe below 10%, I would imagine of Ukraine. If you talk about in Donbass, it's three or four percent. Yeah, so what, the key obviously is to make the Ukrainian economy strong, to make it a vibrant economy. And then of course there's a separate issue which is reconstruction rebuilding. Again, John would know more about this than I do. Whether it's possible to bring back the heavy industry in Donbass, I don't know. It's probably difficult. There's a lot of damage. I don't know whether it was competitive before the conflict, I imagine it might not have been. The framework for this from an EU point of view was the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, which as we remember, was a key part of Russian unhappiness, right? And it has been in provisional force for several years now, but in September of last year, it came into full force. So we now have a framework between the EU and the Ukraine and it applies to issues such as the famous DCFTA, deep and comprehensive free trade agreement, but it applies to foreign policy coordination, many, many other areas. We had visa liberalization last year with Ukraine. Very, very important, as you can imagine, for Ukrainians to be able to travel to the EU without having to get a visa beforehand. So that's important as part of the framework. Government funding and what the international, financial institutions can provide will be very important, no doubt. But at the end of the day, a success or failure will depend on Ukraine's ability to create conditions that attract international capital because it feels that it's worthwhile investing in Ukraine. So we can help on, as governments, as international organizations, we can help in that regard on the edges, but it's the private sector at the end of the day in the 21st century that's going to make the difference. And so that will be key and that is where we get back to issues such as corruption, good governance, and all these things. I think that's what I would contribute. Great, thank you, Boris. So, Sarah, Jim also noted the issues of disinformation in the Balkans, Russian disinformation. And I wonder if you could speak to how is that a challenge for Ukraine in a sustaining of the peace and any other observations you may have on sustaining the peace? Sure. First to say, I agree, obviously, that Putin's decision is fundamental, but I think it's important to go beyond that and think what are the other elements that need to happen. This weaponization of information is really critical. We're experiencing this in multiple fronts. We should assume that it will continue in Ukraine well after a peace negotiation is done and a peacekeeping operation is fielded. And I am not confident that just as we are struggling in the United States to understand how we respond, and I think our European colleagues, to the use of social media to divide grievances that already exist by Russian sources, I think that we should assume that's gonna happen in Ukraine and in parts of Eastern Ukraine. And I don't think the UN is well-positioned to address it. And so we should be thinking about what that looks like, what kinds of technical expertise are needed to bring to bear. I say this thinking of my colleagues at Carnegie Mellon who are quite focused on these issues, who around the world could be thinking about how you would monitor it. There are many different contexts in which we see this happening. It has become a standard effort in preventing atrocities, for example. It needs to be a standard issue in peacekeeping operations. On this issue now, so those are two slightly negative points. Let me end on a positive point, not to be Pollyanna-ish, but I think there is an opportunity for regrowth. And again, thinking of Pittsburgh, but other cities that have become essentially, they've moved from the 19th century to the 21st century. I think there needs to be a lot of thought into what kinds of industry would actually make sense. What kind of workforce would you need to be able to support it? What kind of investment would it draw? I think those who think going back to coal in eastern Ukraine is, I don't see a future there. So what else would it be for the fundamentals for that economy? Okay, so now we open up to questions, but I'm gonna give Jim Pardue the first opportunity to ask a question, and then we'll open up to everybody else. Jim, I think we have a microphone up front, please. One of the keys to success in Balkans was the fact that the president of the Secretary of State were totally focused on the issue. Jim, can you speak up a little bit? I'm not sure the microphone's there. Okay, let me get a little closer. Oh, there you go. Okay, one of the keys to success in the Balkans was the fact that the president of the Secretary of State were totally involved in this, on a daily basis. And we had very close relationships with our key European allies. I just, my question is whether major progress is possible in Ukraine, I've been counseled, it's Ukraine, not the Ukraine. Thank you, Jim. In Ukraine, with the current set of relationships with traditional allies in Europe and a distracted White House and the confusion in the administration over the US relationship with Russia. Who wants to take it? Sarah, you want to take it? I hear you, and it is a concern. I think one of the sort of parlor games people play in Washington is trying to figure out what impact the retreat of US leadership has when it matters and when it doesn't matter. And I think if there's enough momentum, especially from European colleagues, but others as well, along with a very good process that Kurt and others are leading, that it is possible. I don't know that it's absolutely, I understand the role that the secretary and POTUS played in previous administrations. I still believe there's something that can be done, even if it is not a daily agenda for this president. It really involves the will of some other parties that we've been discussing. John, any thoughts on this? Okay, let's go to, so we have one back there. We've got a lot of hands, so we might have to, so keep them short so we can pack them in. John Katz, German Marshall Fund. Thank you for this event. I have a couple quick questions. Is that on? Is this on? Okay. One actually has to do, as Deboros is a question about the EU track and lessons learned in the Balkans, based on the fact that the Balkans have been on track for over many Balkan countries for 15 plus years, that stall process has had an impact on the trajectory of Balkan countries, and Macedonia is one of those real test cases where they were very close to being in or on that track, and then that track stopped. Obviously, Ukraine and Georgia, Moldova, have their own association agreements, DCFTA. They all are interested in EU membership, but the perspective isn't there. Maybe you could speak to that and lessons learned from that, although it's still a lesson that's still ongoing, if you can speak to that. And then John, I wanted to ask about a sphere of influence. There's been a couple of pieces written here in Washington I've seen about neutrality, about Ukraine and maybe others that part of this deal with Minsk and going beyond with Russia includes some terminology of neutrality that these countries like Ukraine should not become NATO members, that we ought to respect that. I don't agree with that opinion, so I just want to say that upfront, but it's something that I think there's something else within the context of US-Russian relations in Ukraine that is also out there in this conversation and want to understand where that fits in. And then also, Sierra, I agree with the, I think really one of the things that I thought missing from Minsk this process the entire time was the economic component of this, a challenging one. And maybe speak to that a little bit more and of course maybe you want to. I heard what you said about, and I think this goes to the US and others, who's gonna help work with Ukraine to pay for this? Because we know the price tag is gonna be quite significant and if you don't address that, there isn't that type of stability on the ground and it's very likely to fail this process. You can find yourself in a worse position because of the Russia, Ukrainians internally than we are today. Great, thank you. So a lot of questions and impact in there. Boris, you want to lead off? Yeah. I think we just had the European Commission put out a strategy on the Western Balkans whenever it was 10 days ago and it reaffirms the vision of the countries of the Western Balkans joining the European Union. That's important. I think if you don't have that, you're looking at reform fatigue, at failure in individual countries, certainly. The difficulty, of course, is that the EU is already quite big and getting to decisions is already difficult. So I think there's legitimate questions being asked by governments and by citizens within the EU. How can we make it work? There's an imperative to bring these countries in, but how will we make the EU, how will we keep it functional? So there's really a piece of homework here which is how can we reform our institutions and maintain a capability to act? But no doubt, I think this is a key part and for Ukraine, it's a key part and that's what people in Ukraine fought over, starting in not 2013, but actually if we go back to 2004. If I remember correctly. Obviously, you're right in the areas of Eastern Ukraine, there is a lot of investment that is necessary and I imagine that that's the kind of place where you will have to mobilize international funding, governmental funding, funding from international financial institutions in order to make that work. There's no doubt about that. It's not just a market-driven thing. I agree. John, is there any quick follow-ups on the other questions? On the issue of neutrality, this is something which has been part of the conversation since the Russians went into Donbass. You had a famous op-eds by both Brzezinski and Kissinger along these lines. I don't know of anyone in Ukraine outside of the opposition block that'd be willing to talk about this. I think it's a complete non-starter in Ukraine and I also think that, I'm not in the US government. I left the State Department seven and a half years ago but I'm pretty sure there's not part of the US policy that's not going to be part in any near future. Sarah? Very briefly, on Minsk, I think one of the things that I've heard repeatedly is that while, with all due respect to our European colleagues, that Minsk is not terribly supported by large parts of the Ukrainian population and to go beyond Minsk, recognize Minsk but go beyond it in the Donbass's future, this economic piece needs to be a part of it and maybe it is a study that the World Bank does or the IFIs do. I think it needs to be informed though by sustainable development. By that I mean there will be an uptick in jobs as the international community comes into Eastern Ukraine. That will produce a number of jobs but that is not a sustainable operation and we see this in the Balkans, we see this in Bosnia with a lot of unemployed males sitting in coffee shops with a lot of time on their hands. And so trying to figure out what exactly the job growth plan, this is not easy by the way, we have this in the United States but in this particular context I think it is really a tremendous challenge to keeping the peace. Let me take three questions, one far back and then over here and over here, okay? And then we'll get onto some others. Thank you very much, Ann Phillips, USIP. I have a question about power sharing and structuring the peace to bring back the discussion on the Balkans to possible solutions in the Ukraine. The Dayton Accords and the Arhut Agreement provided peace for a long time but I think we see a lot of the roots of current tensions in the way power sharing was structured along ethnic and religious lines. You've mentioned the possibility of decentralization in Ukraine. How would that work? Because the challenge is always to knit these societies back together again. Comes back to the civil society thing. When I was in the Balkans some years ago, women's organizations operated across these ethnic and religious lines serves Croats, Bosniaks together and they were just waiting, may I say, for the men to get out of the way so they could bring these societies back together again. And so your thoughts would be welcome. Thank you. Is that over here? Yes. Thank you for the panel. Lydia Zavitska-Wolson Center. I have a question that kind of reiterates the point made by Ambassador Herbs about it's hard to move on unless we start with Russian aggression, subsiding or pulling out and Boris point of emphasizing the importance of peacekeeping as a new element that's emerging on the international calculus there. But going beyond linking these two and beyond the punitive measures of sanctions and strong diplomacy, what other attractive pieces could be put on a table to keep Russia involved and interested in pursuing that? Thank you. That piece. Great. We have one over here. Hi. Is this on, yeah? Yeah. My name is George Tolne. I'm a professor. I have written books on Bosnia and on Ukraine. Coming out of the Balkans, the peacemaking process in Bosnia was based on an ethno-territorial agreement, 4951 Dayton Peace Accord, which created Bosnia as a state with two entities. It was then in Kosovo, it, we established peace because borders were changed and that was recognized and new state was created. And then in Macedonia, you had a consociational agreement. So three different strategies coming out of the Balkans. You go to Ukraine today and the best social science research that we have, it's Zeus from Berlin that are doing surveys there in Crimea and also in the Donbas. They indicate the majority of the population in Crimea and we know this. I know this from my own research as well. And identified with Russia are happy with the annexation. The indications are in the Donbas, about 4 million people, that there's greater identification with Russia. War changes people, war polarizes people. So why aren't some of the things that brought peace, ugly peace in many ways, peace that's flawed in lots of ways, but nevertheless brought peace in the Balkans? Why aren't those on the table in the case of Ukraine? Okay. So first of the question of what does it do? Agreement, solidify ethnic lines and the role of decentralization in Ukraine. Who would like to take a stab at that? Of course, please. Thanks. So to address the last question, I'm not quite sure where you would fit in the Minsk agreement and the elements in there. Local autonomy, amnesty in your typology. Because obviously there's something here. That is the quid pro quo, if you like. Restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty, full control over the borders by the government of Ukraine and in return. Local autonomy, amnesty for people who were involved in the insurgency or whatever you want to call it against the government in Kiev. I don't know where that fits in precisely. Change of borders is not, I think the Kosovo case is very particular. I don't think that is something that anyone in the case of Ukraine would be willing to look at. And an ethno-territorial, it's less of an ethno-territorial issue than was the case in Bosnia. And again, I think you simply have to look at the map and look at what territories we're talking about. Leaving aside Crimea for a moment, which is a very difficult question and not a short-term proposition in terms of a solution. If you look at Donbas, I think you're talking about quite a small part of the territory of the state of Ukraine. I think the question about what is it that we have to offer Russia in this, it's a good question that Russia has made it very difficult for all of us. The German approach to Russia and to the Soviet Union if we go farther back has always been a mix between a deterrence and defense piece on the one hand, which is very relevant today, sadly. And on the other hand, a dialogue piece. And we feel very strongly that we need to maintain channels of communication with Russia and it's very good to see that the U.S. government has decided to put Kurt Volcker out there to engage with Mr. Sorkoff, right? And then you can have a conversation about how productive is it, why is it taking so long, all these things. But there is an ongoing communication there and that's how it needs to be in our opinion. If you want to move this forward, you have to engage Russia. What we have to offer, I'm a bit, I think you do have to acknowledge concerns by Russian speaking population in Ukraine, for example, those kinds of things for sure. But I don't know whether we have a something major that we can put forward to get Russia to do what it hasn't done, which is make sure that the Minsk agreement is implemented. And if Russia wanted Minsk agreement to be implemented, it would not be so difficult. I think we all agree on that. Okay, we have two minutes. So, Sarah, quickly, and Mike said he'd like to have a couple words on this one, so. I think the big bargaining chip is to end what has been the isolation of Russia given this behavior. I mean, understanding that the road to a normal or begin to normalize relationships is through Ukraine. There's a joke that Condi Rice would tell apparently that Gorbachev walks in the first day of his chairmanship and says, who are my friends? Paris, London, Washington, and they're like, no, no, it's Havana, you've got Syria. He's like, with friends like that, what can I do? So, Putin's not Gorbachev obviously, but I think that the isolation has had an impact. Mike, quickly, and then I'm gonna give John the last word. He's gonna probably say something I would say. Very, very careful about citing public opinion data in territories that have undergone violence. I mean, the fact is, the last public opinion survey taken in Ukraine before the invasion showed a small majority in favor of sticking with Ukraine. In Crimea and Donbass. I'm just about to say, and the same thing in Donbass. It's even more outspokenly true in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mr. Dordek would like the Republic of CERPSCO to have a plebiscite there, which would be overwhelmingly for secession. Why? Because of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Before the war started, as you well know, 41% of what's now the territory of the Republic of CERPSCO was Bosniak and only 37, 38% served in the rest craw and a few others. The only reason that he'd get a majority is because of killing people. We can't allow that. John, last word. Well, Michael preempted part of what I wanted to say, but let me just put this in a different context. You have a crisis in Crimea and in Donbass because a major nation committed aggression against another, not because of local dissatisfaction. The Kremlin had to send in its troops to stop Ukraine from taking back all of Donbass in August of 14, because the local population was not gonna fight against their government in Kiev, even though they weren't particularly fond of the government in Kiev. That is the basic structure of this conflict and the solution is very simple, Kremlin aggression ceases. Now getting there does require providing Putin some face savers and we talked about the process with international peacekeepers and such, but also there are legitimate steps that the Ukrainian government can take not inconsistent with the way they behaved in the past on issues like use of Russian language, on issues like the prerogatives of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, which can be seen as gestures to the Kremlin which Putin can point to as his troops leave Ukraine. That's the basic framework in which we'll get a deal, but this crisis did not start because the Ukrainian, ethnic Ukrainians in the villages of Donbass did not get along with the ethnic Russians in the cities of Donbass. This began with an insurgency finance led and armed from Moscow, full stop. John, Sarah, Boris, thank you so much for your comments. Again, thanks to Mike and to Jim for the earlier panel. Please join me in thanking them. Thank you.