Oslo and Minsk both bought time. The Gaza roadmap is assembled from the same parts.

On 31 August 2015, three Ukrainian National Guardsmen died outside parliament in Kyiv. Ihor Derbin was 25. Oleksandr Kostyn was 20. Neither was killed at the front.

They died over a first reading. The Rada was voting on a constitutional amendment granting special status to Donetsk and Luhansk, a clause Minsk II obliged Ukraine to write into its own constitution. Ukraine’s negotiators had accepted that clause six months earlier, with the president in the room, while the Debaltseve pocket was closing around several thousand of their own soldiers.

It did not save Debaltseve. Minsk II was signed on 12 February 2015. The ceasefire took effect on the 15th. Debaltseve fell on the 18th.

The amendment passed its first reading and was never adopted. It could not be. No Ukrainian government was going to write a veto for Donetsk into the constitution and survive Kyiv, and anyone who had spent a week in Kyiv that year knew it. It was signed anyway, under pressure, to stop a battle it did not stop. Then the failure to deliver it became the grievance the other side needed for the next seven years.

Count the intervals. Oslo II, September 1995. The Second Intifada, September 2000. Five years. Minsk II, February 2015. Full-scale invasion, February 2022. Seven.

I have been on the receiving end of both........

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