Breaking the rules: How the Black Sea deals created a new model for mediating in armed conflict – David Harland

This article by David Harland, HD’s Executive Director, is based on his speech at the recent Wilton Park event on “Collaborative conflict resolution in a competitive age”.

Photo: HD in Odesa in August 2023. Weeks later, the hotel in the background was hit by a missile attack. (Credit: Mishchenko Oleksii)

As the war in Ukraine grinds into its third year, it’s worth reflecting on one bright spot – the Black Sea Initiative – and how its unorthodox structure holds promise for inventive solutions to other conflicts.  

What’s most interesting about the Black Sea Initiative is not just that it worked. 

It did work, of course, allowing Ukraine to get most of its grain to the world market in the first year of the war, before it broke the Russian blockade of the Black Sea in the second half of 2023. 

Via the initiative, Ukraine exported over 30 million tons of grain, which helped to keep prices manageable at a time of global food crisis, and it earned Ukraine about 10 billion euros in gross revenue at a time of massive economic stress. 

But what’s really interesting is that it represented a completely different approach to mediation in armed conflict – a new kind of agreement that we need to think about when we look at the South China Sea or even at the Houthis in Yemen. 

Above all, the Black Sea Initiative is interesting because it succeeded despite appearing to violate the two cardinal principles of mediation: ripeness and equidistance. 

Ripeness is all – or is it?

In theory, according to Zartman and many others, deals can be made in armed conflict when they become “ripe” because a “mutually hurting stalemate” has emerged. 

The Black Sea Initiative could not have been further from ripe.

When I first spoke with a senior Ukrainian official about the possibility of a deal with Russia to enable Ukraine to export its grain, about seven weeks after the war began, he laughed.

And when I said it might be a win-win equation and a great way to address issues of food security in Africa, he laughed again. (I should add that he did quickly become a key supporter and brought the issue to the national leadership ahead of the visit of the UN Secretary-General.)

HD’s regional director for Eurasia travelled to Odesa and encountered the same initial incredulity.

Not only was the idea of Ukrainian grain ships sailing through the Russian blockade not ripe when HD floated it but it was so far from ripe that the bemused parties did not even seem to realise there was fruit there at all.

The other key concept in mediation is equidistance, which can be visualised as a Venn diagram.

Mediation theory holds that parties have interests or positions or principles which, when a deal is ripe for the making, might include some overlap, creating a “zone of possible agreement”. 

But this was a deal in which Ukraine got almost everything – safe passage through Russia’s blockade for millions of tons of grain worth billions of euros – and Russia got hardly anything except for a few promises from the United Nations that restrictions on its agricultural exports would be eased, which were never really delivered on. 

At least on the surface, there was no equidistance or equilibrium at all. On the narrow issue of Ukrainian grain, there was no zone of possible agreement. 

Kinetic models

So what’s going on? How could a deal succeed so spectacularly when it violated these cardinal principles? And is there anything to learn for other mediation processes?

The answer is not that the mediation principles of ripeness and equidistance are misconceived. Rather, they’re just more complicated than they seem, and more dynamic.

Ripeness is not a uniform state that applies to a whole conflict. It’s more like a mosaic – discrete areas of interest with an internal logic that might be quite different from other issues around it.

And in the spring and summer of 2022, some of the mosaic ‘tiles’ of interest were coloured ‘ripe’ even when most of the other tiles that made up the mosaic of the war in Ukraine war, and the overall picture, were not coloured ripe at all. 

As for equidistance, perhaps it just needs to be understood as being more complicated than a Venn diagram or a statue of Lady Justice holding aloft a pair of perfectly balanced scales. 

The zone of possible agreement in this case was more like one of those Calder mobiles with various pieces of different sizes and colours moving around at varying distance from one another. 

On one side, there was the big piece of Russia’s wish to consolidate support in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and China.

A smaller piece was Russia’s wish for certain easements that would allow it to export more agricultural goods. Another little piece was its need for a fig leaf if it backed down in order to secure the external support it wanted. 

On the other side, the biggest piece was Ukraine’s need to break the Russian blockade to save its economy, along with the pieces representing the concerns of African nations, China and others about keeping Ukrainian grain flowing to help keep food prices down. 

It could all work, but all the pieces had to be in right places at the right time, properly balanced.

Creative collective

The ‘Calder’ model for the Black Sea Initiative reflects its dual origins.

In the days after the war began, Russian forces surged along the Black Sea coast, and probing attacks were launched around Odesa itself. It appeared that the whole of the Ukrainian coast, along with all of its ports, might fall to the Russians.

But the Russian invasion stalled at the river crossing of Mykolaiv on 6 March, and the frontlines began to stabilise, leaving a huge agricultural hinterland in Ukrainian hands, along with its three largest ports and the transport infrastructure that fed them.

HD’s Ukraine team prepared an assessment of what Ukrainian grain was available for export, and how it would have to move.

At the same time, HD colleagues in Africa were reporting on the impact of surging food prices – the price of wheat had spiked about 25% on global markets in the days after the Russian invasion began – and they were convinced that those African countries could influence Putin to let Ukrainian grain flow.

HD combined these two elements – Ukraine’s need and capacity to export, along with the concerns of African nations and others affected by surging food prices – into a concept note that we then took to the UN Secretary-General and to the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The beauty of the initiative, in my view, was that the pieces of the Calder-like arrangement were put in place by very diverse sets of actors, each working on a discrete part of the assembly.

The United Nations had two teams. One worked with Türkiye to prepare the agreement on the regime under which grain ships would be able to come and go across the Black Sea, through the Russian blockade. The other UN team worked on a balancing Memorandum of Understanding with Moscow on Russia’s own agricultural exports.

The Director-General of the WTO worked with African leaders, starting with African Union Chairperson President Macky Sall of Senegal, urging them to bring pressure to bear on Moscow.

China, the G7 and others all played parts in assembling the overall mechanism, with the statement by China’s Wang Yi perhaps being decisive in Moscow.

HD’s roles in operations after the original concept were quite limited. We helped prepare the ground in Kyiv and Moscow, we seconded two director-level colleagues to work with the two UN teams and, when the time came, we seconded two more staff to help set up the Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul that oversaw implementation of the agreement.

But, above all, we kept an eye on the overall architecture of the mechanism, pitching in where more work seemed to be needed – such as with China and the African countries – trying to help bring the thing into balance.

It had to be like this, I think, because no single set of actors could have delivered it.  

Constructing a complex initiative – a diplomatic Calder mobile – requires actors of different types and weights and visibilities.

In the case of the Black Sea Initiative, what kept the actors together was not coordination; communication between the various teams was sometimes patchy at best. What held it together, and kept moving it forward, was a shared vision of where it could go.

Was the Black Sea Initiative a fix-all at a time when mediation in armed conflict struggles? No.

But maybe it widens our understanding of what deals are possible in wartime or in the shadow of war.

And maybe it also moves us away from the rather depressingly deterministic world of ‘ripeness’ and into a world in which ideas and creativity and rigour still have vital roles in making peace.