International supervision of the Donbas?

Amongst the various institutional precedents occasionally invoked in discussions about a post-war settlement in eastern Ukraine, the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina occupies a peculiar place. It is neither a frozen conflict nor a model of full reconciliation. Rather it is an example of an externally imposed legal and administrative solution, sustained over decades by international supervision, arbitration authority and a willingness to subordinate local sovereignty to long-term stability. As negotiations concerning the future of the Donbas increasingly confront the problem of territorial control, governance and minority protection, the Brčko model deserves careful examination, not as a template to be copied mechanically, but as a set of principles that illuminate what may be possible when conventional sovereignty proves insufficient. In short, the model provides that where the parties cannot agree over a specific piece of territory, they assign the issue to third-party determination (arbitration) at a later date and supervision of the territory by an international civilian force.

The Brčko District emerged from one of the most intractable problems left unresolved by the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995. The town of Brčko and its surrounding area lay at a strategic choke point along the Sava River, connecting the eastern and western halves of Republika Srpska. Both Bosnian entities claimed it, and neither was prepared to relinquish it without undermining the internal coherence of the fragile post-war state. Dayton therefore deferred the question to binding international arbitration. In 1999, the arbitral tribunal removed Brčko from the jurisdiction of both entities and placed it under the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, governed as a self-contained district under extensive international supervision.

The key to Brčko’s durability has not been the elegance of its constitutional design, but the concentration of authority vested in the international supervisor. The supervisor possessed powers to impose laws, remove elected officials, restructure institutions and override local obstruction. In effect, Brčko became a space in which sovereignty was pooled upwards to the state level and outwards to the international community, in exchange for security guarantees, freedom of movement and the gradual reintegration of displaced populations. The arrangement was openly paternalistic, legally exceptional and politically intrusive. Yet it worked sufficiently well to prevent renewed conflict in one of the most sensitive territories in post-war Bosnia.

The Donbas presents a superficially similar challenge but on a vastly different scale. Like Brčko, parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions are territorially fragmented, ethnolinguistically mixed and symbolically central to the narratives of competing political projects. Control over the Donbas has been used by Moscow as a lever to constrain Kyiv’s strategic choices, particularly her aspirations towards European and Atlantic integration. For Ukraine the Donbas is not merely territory but proof of the indivisibility of the state and the illegitimacy of foreign-imposed partitions. Any settlement that leaves these regions in a legal or political grey zone risks perpetuating instability.

A Brčko-style solution for the Donbas would therefore not be about compromise sovereignty in the abstract, but about interrupting the cycle by which contested local governance becomes a proxy battlefield for geopolitical competition. One conceivable model would involve the temporary removal of certain districts from ordinary Ukrainian regional administration, placing them under a special internationally supervised regime. Sovereignty would remain unequivocally Ukrainian, but key competences relating to policing, judicial administration, elections, language policy and economic regulation would be exercised under an international mandate, with binding authority to override local spoilers.

Such a regime would differ fundamentally from the Minsk agreements, which attempted to embed special status within Ukraine’s constitutional order while leaving enforcement dependent upon good faith by actors who manifestly lacked it. The Brčko model assumes bad faith as a baseline condition. It is designed precisely for environments where local elites benefit from instability and where external actors seek to weaponise ambiguity. In that sense, it is less a confidence-building measure than a confidence-substituting one.

However the obstacles to applying this approach to the Donbas are formidable. Unlike Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine is not a post-conflict international protectorate but a sovereign state fighting a war of national survival against a nuclear-armed aggressor. Any international supervisory regime would require Russia’s acquiescence, at least formally, and robust security guarantees to prevent its subversion. The scale of the territory involved would also strain the resources and political will of any conceivable international mission. Brčko covers a district of some 500 square kilometres. The occupied parts of the Donbas are orders of magnitude larger, with millions of inhabitants and deeply militarised landscapes.

There is also the question of legitimacy. In Bosnia, international supervision was accepted grudgingly as the price of ending a war that had exhausted all parties. In Ukraine, there is a powerful and understandable reluctance to accept arrangements that appear to dilute sovereignty or reward aggression. Any Brčko-like model would therefore need to be framed not as an international administration imposed upon Ukraine, but as a Ukrainian choice, temporarily delegating certain functions to ensure reintegration on Kyiv’s terms rather than Moscow’s.

One possible path would be a phased approach, beginning with limited international supervision in selected urban centres or transport corridors, focused on demilitarisation, returns of displaced persons and the re-establishment of civilian administration. Over time, and subject to strict benchmarks, authority could be progressively transferred back to Ukrainian institutions. Crucially, the supervising body would need enforcement powers that go beyond monitoring or reporting, including the ability to dismiss officials, annul fraudulent elections and command an armed peacekeeping presence.

The broader lesson of Brčko is that durable peace in contested territories often requires an explicit suspension of normal politics. Liberal assumptions about decentralisation, local autonomy and electoral legitimacy do not hold in spaces that have been systematically distorted by violence, propaganda and foreign intervention. In such environments, neutrality enforced by an external authority may be less democratic in form but more democratic in outcome, creating the conditions in which genuine political competition can eventually re-emerge.

For the Donbas, the question is not whether such an arrangement would be ideal. It would not. The question is whether, in the aftermath of a war that has already shattered the post-Soviet security order, Ukraine and her partners are prepared to contemplate solutions that acknowledge the depth of institutional damage inflicted upon the region. Brčko demonstrates that, under certain conditions, sovereignty can be preserved not by insisting upon its immediate and total exercise, but by temporarily sharing it in ways that deny spoilers the space in which to operate.

Whether the international community possesses the resolve to play such a role in eastern Ukraine remains uncertain. Yet as conventional ceasefires and autonomy formulae continue to fail, the logic of robust, intrusive supervision may come to appear less radical than the alternative: a permanently contested Donbas, neither at war nor at peace, serving indefinitely as a fault line in Europe’s security architecture.

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The author was formerly the Chief Legal Adviser to the International Supervisor of Brčko District and wrote a book about his experiences entitled A Free City in the Balkans.